


When I am King

by vinnie2757



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, F/M, because i am a sucker for fairy tales, i sort of almost promise, its a cinderella snow white sort of au, nobody dies this time, there is a very literal slap in the face from a villain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-03-17 12:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13659015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Clint is a Prince, under pressure to marry to take the throne from the Regent, Nick, who has held the throne since the untimely death of Clint's parents when he was a child.Laura is a servant girl, hidden from the world to protect her from a threat she doesn't remember, in a house run by a man who treats her as a slave.They meet, as dreams often begin, in the woods, and a smile is all it takes.[Cinderella/Snow White AU]





	1. Into the Woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint goes hunting, and Laura goes into town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is a very literal slap in the face from strucker to laura. he is an asshole, and he will get his comeuppance.
> 
> I hope you enjoy, my lovelies~!

Clint wakes up one morning in spring, just after dawn, to the sound of rain pitter-pattering on the windows. They're his favourite mornings by far, quiet and peaceful mornings with less drama and more water. He lies there for a minute, watching the rain through his open curtains, and then hauls out of bed to throw the balcony doors open and step out into the early morning mist, his hair flat to his scalp in seconds. It's the fine rain that soaks you, but he'll be warmed soon by a bath and tea and a three course breakfast, so he doesn't mind too much. He'd overheated in the night beside, his armpits sticky with sweat, so the chill is nice.

A knock at the door, and he turns back into his chambers as it opens.

Phil peeks around the door, bows his head.

‘Your Highness,’ he says, and Clint makes a noise in the back of his throat.

‘Stop that,’ he huffs, and reaches for a towel by the door. The maids know him too well by now. ‘I have a name, and you've known me long enough to use it.’

Phil opens his mouth, and then nods. ‘Yes,’ he says, because it's easier than arguing. ‘The Regent would like to see you.’

‘If this is about getting married again, you can find the Grand Duchess not in her chambers.’

Phil's ears go red; it had only taken catching said Lady in a compromising position once for him to get a full measure of her character, but Clint doesn't think Phil knows Natasha at all.

‘It isn't about the Duchess,’ he assures the Prince. ‘I think it's about the hunting party.’

Clint's eyes go to the ceiling. ‘I'll see him as soon as I'm ready.’

Satisfied, Phil bows out of the room, and off he goes. Clint can hear him whistling. He scrubs his hair with a towel, and pads across the room to the bathroom, where he runs himself a bath and stays there until his fingers prune. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to go and see the Regent, because he does; Nick had saved his life, and had done more than his fair share in keeping the kingdom running, but Clint – he has other things he wants to do. And Nick will only tell him that the weather is wrong to take the party out.

‘Steve will get sick,’ Clint tells himself as he scrubs himself dry, in a falsetto that is nothing like Nick’s voice. ‘And I’m not about to tell his doctor what you made him do to get sick in the first place.’ He barks out a laugh, and in his own voice, he replies, ‘as if it’s not Steve’s idea!’

This is a lie; Steve has never once told them he’d like to go hunting; the opposite, generally, is what comes out of his mouth. But Steve likes the social aspect of it, likes riding out into the woods with them, likes taking the picnic lunches the kitchen make them up, likes to have his sketchbook and some charcoal to hand to cobble some sketches of the Prince and his men together.

Clint is happy enough to pose for him; Steve drawing is about the only time the fool isn’t getting into trouble. He’s gotten Clint into enough trouble over the years, and not one word of apology has ever left his lips for it, either.

Dressed, and ready to bear his fate, Clint heads down to one of the antechambers, where he knows breakfast and Nick will be waiting. As expected, breakfast is there, porridge and fruits and that imported coffee that Clint has loved since he first tried it and remains the only thing he actively asks for from his staff. Nick is the other side of the table, and lifts his cup when Clint drops into his seat, rattling the cutlery. He’s reading a scroll.

‘The court wants to see you married,’ he says, by way of greeting.

Clint dips a shoulder, gets a line of sight, and flicks a grape over the scroll. Nick moves his cup, so the grape misses. But it would have landed, if he hadn’t.

‘Darn,’ Clint says, and helps himself to porridge.

‘Prince,’ Nick says, the way that dickhead chief of staff says “boy” when he wants to insult him. ‘You understand that a unified kingdom is a strong one.’

Clint nearly spits porridge out in his haste to tell Nick to fuck off.

Forcing himself to swallow, he tells Nick that he doesn’t think marriage is right for him, not yet.

He says, ‘I’ve seen the girls you’ve been lining up for me, and I’m not – Nick, I want to marry someone suitable for the kingdom, if I marry at all.’

‘And you will,’ Nick assures him. ‘Do you think I spent twelve years making this kingdom what it is for you to lead it to ruin by marrying some spy?’

Nick has a thing about spies. Clint wonders what exactly happened in his childhood, when his parents died. He wonders what has made Nick so paranoid. He wonders how many girls from the minor nobility have been raised to undermine any leadership Clint will inherit on his marriage. It was a nonsense stipulation, and Nick thought so too. Clint was of age, and his older brother had absconded years ago, leaving him the sole heir. Nick was only supposed to be Regent until Clint came of age, but no, the committee masquerading as a council that had apparently decided it had enough power to decide such things had decided that Clint needed to be married. Nick had done his best to ignore that decision, and coronate the Prince the day he turned of age, but the council had denied it at every turn. Clint had no idea his coronation could be denied like that, and he was ashamed to admit he’d spent a week sulking. Not because he wanted to be king so very badly – he didn’t, he’d be the first to admit that, and everyone who knew him would not be far behind – but because the choice had been taken from him. He was entitled to refuse his coronation, to have more time to prepare, but to not be able to say no, that was hurtful.

Pierce was in his sights, anyway. He’d get rid of the ass as soon as he had a crown on his head. Not the best thinking, but Pierce was the worst of them, a ringleader, cajoling them into this sort of nonsense. He even banned Steve from the war rooms, because having an opinion was not allowed of commoners.

There had been a lot of things said that day, and Clint was glad he and Bucky were kind of sort of good friends. He never wants to be on the receiving end of that left hook, anyway.

‘No,’ Clint says, because he hasn’t replied yet, and Nick is watching him with that one cold eye of his.

Almost nineteen years of knowing him, and Clint has no idea how Nick lost his eye. It had been gone when he arrived in the palace, and it remains gone now. Clint remembers asking throughout his childhood about it, only for Nick to put a hand on his head and tell him to aim better.

‘Nick, I – I want something more, you understand, right?’

‘You cannot have more,’ Nick says, and then sighs. ‘I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life, Clint. I’m ready to retire from this circus. They aren’t my monkeys, they’re yours, and you’ve been ready to step up for a long, long time.’

‘I’m not marrying Natasha,’ Clint tells him. ‘You’d never get her in a wedding dress.’

‘Where is she?’ Nick asks, ‘she didn’t attend her lessons this morning.’

‘Out with Sam, if she’s making good on her threats to dunk him in the fountain.’

If Nick were a lesser man, he might have groaned. As it is, he holds his breath for a second, and then expels it in a great big sigh that makes the steam from the kettle disperse.

‘The council will continue to insist unless you find another bride,’ he says, and Clint wrinkles his nose, pushes his empty bowl away.

‘I heard from Phil the other day that I was originally meant to marry someone else,’ he says, ‘some Countess or something, but she disappeared.’

‘Duchess, actually,’ Nick says, and helps himself to a peach. ‘Unfortunately, the girl was – taken, from her parents, and we have never been able to relocate her.’

Nick is a fucking liar, and Clint knows that Nick knows he knows it. The girl is dead, and he sniffs.

‘So you got me Nat instead.’

‘The thing about being a Regent, Clint, when you’re clearing up the mess left to you by the drunkard that called himself King, is that you have to make as much progress and advantage as possible. And I did that. I gave you your best friend, didn’t I?’

Clint sniffs again. ‘Nat is a pain in my ass.’

Nick doesn’t tell him to watch his mouth, because Clint has said much worse things about Nick to his face, and Nat would put “pain in the Prince’s ass” on her calling card with pride, were she of the sort to ever announce her presence in advance.

‘But yes,’ Clint acquiesces. ‘She is my best friend, and I’ve never not expressed my gratitude for you getting her here. But I can’t – my parents loved each other, once, and I want to be able to love my wife.’

‘And you will,’ Nick assures him, dusting his hands off, and getting to his feet. ‘But it will not be love at first sight. Clint, you are a Prince, and you are due to take your throne. Love should not be a primary concern. You will learn to love your wife as your mother learned to love your father.’

It’s like being stabbed; loving his father is what got her killed.

 Swallowing, Clint nods.

‘Yes, sir.’

Nick lingers for a second, and then sweeps from the room, looking every bit the Regent he’s always been, straight back and high chin, hands clasped behind his back, scroll in hand.

Clint stares at the table for a few minutes, and then shoves his chair back, getting to his feet and stomping off out of the room and heading to the library.

Steve will no doubt be there at this time, having stolen some of the younger servants to teach them to read. A revolutionary, that kid. Clint’ll be out of a job by the time he’s done, no doubt. Bucky will be there, too, and with the two of them in tow, Clint can get out of this gilded cage for a few hours. Maybe they’ll even find a stag this time.

 

* * *

  

Not that far away, sitting in her bedroom in the attic, overlooking the modest lands that had been her home for so long, and the beautiful royal palace that overlooks everything, Laura heaves a sigh, and listens to the bell ringing.

She’s tired. She’s been tired for a very long time, but she doesn’t mind – no, she does mind, she minds very much, in fact.

It’s been a rainy morning, with the sun casting rainbows across the horizons, and she longs to take the horse and ride until she finds a pot of gold at the end of one. But the bell is ringing again, more insistently, and so she gets out of the window seat she’d made for herself from an old wooden crate and a blanket, and rushes down the stairs, holding her skirt in one hand and the banister in the other.

Skidding across the tiles, she takes a second to straighten herself out, smoothes her hair, and then opens the door to the parlour, eyes cast to the floor.

‘Is everything to order?’ she asks.

The Baron sits in his chair, looking smug and like there’s dirt on his nose, and then gestures at the tray of tea things on the table between him and his guest.

‘This has been here for too long,’ he says, and Laura rises onto the balls of her feet to make little noise as she walks across the room to collect it. ‘I rang for you three times; you have nothing else to do, so there is nothing to keep you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

His guest laughs, raucous.

‘I tell you, Wolfgang,’ the guest chortles, all jowls and unkempt beard, ‘I wouldn’t be allowing any servant girl of mine to have this kind of attitude!’

Laura eyeballs him as she puts the tea things back onto the tray from under her lashes. She doesn’t recognise him, but she doesn’t need to, she’ll never see him again. The Baron doesn’t keep friends around for very long.

‘No,’ the Baron says, and as Laura turns to leave the room, his boot heel finds the back of her skirt and gives it an unfriendly shove. It’s only the expectation of getting a kick up the backside that keeps her on her feet, and she steps out of the attack before it’s really connected. ‘She’ll be suitably punished later.’

Locked in her room with a mark on her face, most likely. He doesn’t do much to her, all told, can’t. Even though he’s gotten rid of almost all other staff members in the house, he doesn’t much lay a finger on her, nor say a word. He has all these airs about it, but the Baron is very much dealing with someone bigger than himself, and whoever that is keeps her safe. She doubts it’ll last forever; she’s of age, and she thinks most girls her age would have been married by now, but she has no dowry to offer, and no father to walk her down the aisle. Her father had died many years ago, and she doesn’t think the Baron would let her leave the house to meet a nice apprentice boy. Even though she runs most of the domestic errands in town, she doesn't dare think about such things.

After washing the tea things and setting them to dry, Laura looks at what she has left to do; too much for just her. There are clothes to wash, rooms to clean, and she has to go into town to collect goods for the Baron, and food besides. It’s too much, but she’ll make time to get it all done. Wash the clothes, and while they’re drying, she can go into town. Clean the rooms when she’s back, hopefully the clothes will be dry.

Heaving a sigh, she turns to the washing tub, tightening her apron about her waist, only to walk into the Baron.

‘Oh! My apologies, sir,’ she says, dipping into a small curtsey, head down and gaze on his polished boots.

She’d polished them last night, the black still under her nails. Her father had called her his princess, his golden angel, and she wonders what he’d have said to see her now.

The back of the Baron’s hand strikes her cheek, and she turns with it. It’s for show, to give the guest something to see on the way out of the door. She doesn’t get struck often, and finds it bearable, when she can simply lock herself away for an afternoon and work in peace.

‘You are to go to town,’ he says, and shoves a piece of paper into her hand. ‘I have things for you to purchase.’

She glances at the list; she’s collected more than this before, this is modest for his bullying.

‘Yes, sir, I’ll go as soon as I’ve washed the laundry.’

‘You’ll go now.’

‘The laundry will never dry, sir,’ she says, and he raises his hand again. A thick swallow, her cheek throbbing red with his knuckles, and she says, ‘yes sir, I’ll go now.’

‘And be quick about it!’ he snaps, ‘I have a dinner to attend to this evening, don’t forget!’

Laura cannot run away, she daren’t. Not because she fears retribution from this monstrous creature calling itself a Baron, but because there is something worse out there, and she only sometimes manages to catch a glimpse of it. Someone had gone out of their way to give her this, what little it is, and she isn’t about to squander it for being ungrateful. Her parents had given her better manners than that. Be kind, they’d taught her, be kind and have courage. Be strong in the face of those who would see you weak.

She does her best.

‘Yes, sir.’

He stomps off out of the kitchen, and Laura swipes a finger under her eye. Her cheek stings like fire, and she dips her hand into the water bucket to cool it. It doesn’t much help, but it’s better than nothing.

As she rides into town, she reminds herself that the Baron will be gone from mid-afternoon. She will have to finish all her chores before he’s back, but she will have a few precious, blissful hours to herself.

A bird sings in the trees lining the road. She sings back to them, and their chattering warms her heart, just a little. Stroking the horse’s neck, she tells him that he can walk slow, that there’s no need to rush.

‘We have nowhere to be,’ she tells him, and that’s when she hears the horn.

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take long to convince the boys to go out hunting; it takes longer to find them than it does convince them. They all feel as cooped up as Clint does, and Bucky is halfway to the door as soon as he sees the Prince, never mind him having opened his mouth.

Steve purses his lips about it the way he always does.

‘I don’t even really need to find something with antlers,’ Clint says, because he doesn’t. ‘It'd be nice to see one, but I just want to get out of the palace for a while, get some fresh air. The rain’s stopped, and who knows when it’ll start again.’

The sun is looking bright enough, and the clouds are parting, but spring weather is capricious, and Clint’s spent most of the winter feeling sorry for himself; he wants to get back out there as much as possible.

‘Well, I suppose,’ Steve says, and Clint claps him on the shoulder.

‘I’ve got to find Sam,’ he says, ‘you go put a heavier coat on and meet us as the stables.’

He bounds off down the stairs, bumps into Phil on the way.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘For a ride,’ Clint says, ‘with the boys. Maybe hunt, we’ll see what’s out in the woods.’

Phil’s turn to purse his lips.

‘Well, be careful, Your Highness,’ he says, ‘there’s been word of bandits on the path into town, and I know how you boys can be.’

He’s long since stopped trying to come along; they always manage to lose him, and the boys are strong, they can keep the Prince safe. Clint has somehow got the Regent convinced that the safest place for Clint to be is the least protected possible. A hunting party, he’d apparently successfully argued, of his closest friends, was much less conspicuous than a princely retinue.

And, in Clint’s defence, nothing has happened to date, and Sam and Bucky are some of the best soldiers in the kingdom, so he thinks, combined with his own fisticuffs, that he is plenty safe enough should something happen.

 ‘We’ll be careful,’ Clint promises. ‘And I’ll be home before dinner, I haven’t forgotten that there’s that meeting with the committee.’

‘They are a council, Your Highness.’

‘You could have fooled me,’ he says, and tugs on his lapels. ‘I tell you now, Phil, they’re going as soon as I'm on the throne. I’m not having Pierce making me put forth requests for my choice of underwear for the day.’

Pierce has tried his best to dictate every little thing in the kingdom for as long as Clint can remember, but Clint has paid him very little attention; for the most part, what Nick has taught him about decisions and choices and common sense aligns very little with Pierce’s grandiose ideas for the kingdom, and thereby his advice, if it can be called that, can generally be ignored. He wanted to make Bucky a general, when Captain was really all he needed – and most importantly, wanted – to be.

Hell, Clint would make Steve a Captain, just to piss the old codger off.

Except Steve would never accept the position, so it’s a moot point.

‘Either way,’ Phil says, and shifts the ledgers in his elbow. ‘It’ll be a while yet before you take the throne if you don’t find a wife.’

‘I’ll see you this afternoon, Phil,’ Clint grunts, and continues on his way out to find Sam.

As expected, Sam is with the Grand Duchess, nestled away in a corner of the gardens, in the pretty little teahouse that Natasha had fluttered her eyelashes for when she first arrived, calling it a necessity of a Lady’s life. How else would she be able to entertain her other Lady friends, if she did not have a teahouse in which to take tea? To Clint’s knowledge, as her best friend, Natasha has had exactly three Ladies round for tea, and she broke the nose of one of said Ladies, who has never been seen in the palace since. Asking her about it gets a sniff from the Grand Duchess, and she’s grown to be a master of changing the subject. (She’ll pick literally anything, or just sit in silence until you get so uncomfortable that you’ll compliment her necklace or the weather, or leave the room entirely.)

‘We’re going out,’ Clint says as he climbs the steps, not acknowledging the closeness between them.

It’s a well-known secret that Natasha is determined to have an honest man made of Sam, and no secret besides that Sam is as determined to be made honest. Clint remembers Sam knocking on his chamber doors, the pair of them barely of age, and flushing high in his ears as he’d fumbled around asking Clint if he minded, you know, the whole thing between them. Clint had laughed himself blue in the face, because anybody that Natasha showed interest in that wasn’t him made his life easier, and Sam was welcome to try and rein her in all he liked.

‘Where?’ Natasha asks.

‘Nowhere in that dress,’ Clint sniffs, and leans on the doorframe, arms and ankles crossed.

She throws one of the bench’s cushions at him, and he catches it, tosses it back.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ she sniffs, and brushes her bodice down. ‘I’ve only recently had this made.’

It’s a very pretty dress, and Natasha is entitled to spend her money on whatever she likes, but Clint knows as much as anybody who’d ever met her that she’s much more comfortable in breeches and a flouncy shirt than she is in any dress, no matter how fine the silk is.

‘It’s nice,’ Clint assures her, ‘but we’re going into the woods, and you’ll only get it covered in mud. I don’t much fancy hearing the maids complain about the mud stains as though it’s any business of mine.’

Natasha snorts.

‘Are we hunting?’ Sam asks, and Clint nods.

‘Might as well. I doubt we’ll find anything, it’s too wet, but it gives us a reason to stay out longer.’

‘Pierce?’

Clint gives him a withering look. ‘Everyone. If I hear about my future wife one more time I’m going to abdicate and join a monastery.’

Natasha gets to her feet and dusts her dress down. ‘Well, you boys have fun,’ she tells them, and Sam takes her hand to kiss it; the most modest he’s ever been in kissing her. ‘I skipped my lessons this morning, and I’m sure our dear, dear Phil will have something to say about it.’

‘They’re complaining to Nick now,’ Clint warns her.

‘Nick loves me,’ she assures him, with a pat on the shoulder. ‘He won’t punish me.’

And with that, she’s gone, swishing her way up the path back into the palace, turning back to look at Sam as she reaches the stairs. Sam waves to her, and shoves Clint when he catches the Prince grinning.

‘Shut up,’ he says.

‘It’s sweet,’ Clint promises, jumping the steps to catch up to Sam, who’s striding for the stables. ‘It is, it’s super sweet. We’d only make each other miserable, so it’s nice that she’s found someone she can love.’

Sam hesitates for a second then, and it’s only Clint knowing him for so long that he manages to catch the hesitation at all.

‘Yeah,’ Sam says, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Clint looks at him, but Sam doesn’t seem willing to say much else, so Clint leaves it be, and turns his attention instead to a ball of bright, golden fluff bounding towards them.

‘You comin’ too, pup?’ he calls, kneeling to catch the dog. ‘You comin’ too?’

Lucky licks his face, and bounds around him as he gets to his feet, rushing back towards the stables.

‘He must have seen the horses getting saddled,’ Clint says, and Sam nods.

‘He’s a smart one, that dog.’

Steve and Bucky are arguing about the weight of Steve’s coat when they get into the stables, and the stablehands are trying not to snigger at the squabbling. There’s even flapping hands.

‘You two old ladies finished?’ Clint hollers, and without missing a beat, Bucky tells him to get lost. Affronted, Clint puts a hand on his heart. ‘Is that any way to talk to your Prince?’

‘It’s the perfect way to talk to a total brat,’ Bucky tosses over his shoulder, and cups his hands to help Steve into his saddle.

Giving the man a withering look, Steve takes the offered help and swings himself up, stroking his horse’s mane while he waits.

‘No Nat?’ Bucky asks, and holds Clint’s reins while he climbs into his saddle.

‘No, she skipped her lessons this morning, so she’s facing the music. Literally, I think. It’s usually music lessons on Wednesdays.’

Snorting, Sam says, ‘I don’t know why they insist, Tasha can’t play for the life of her.’

‘It’s the Lady like thing to do,’ Bucky shrugs, and finally gets into his own saddle. ‘They’ll never make a Lady out of her, but they like to try. And it gives them something to occupy themselves with.’

The boys nod and agree, and once they’ve got their coattails arranged and their bits comfortable, they head on out the gates and into the woods.

 

* * *

 

Laura reins the horse in when she hears the horn, looks the direction it came from. Beneath her, the horse paws at the ground, huffs and fidgets. She shushes him, one hand rubbing his neck, the other holding his reins tight.

She’s not heard a horn for a long time, and she wonders what it is. The hair on the back of her neck is standing up, and her heart is in her throat, some reaction she can’t identify.

‘Come on,’ she says, patting the horse’s neck and tapping her heels. ‘We’d better move on.’

The horse shakes his head, shivers, and starts to walk. They’re barely a dozen metres before the horn sounds again, and this time, instead of stopping, Laura kicks her heels and the horse bursts into a gallop, racing along the path as fast as he can.

Her heart is pounding so loud in her ears that she can’t hear the wind whipping by, can barely see where she’s going, just focuses on keeping them on the path. If she panics, the horse will panic, and she knows that the Baron won’t be happy if she breaks her leg. They race into town, and only once they’re at the gates does she slow them down to a walk. Looking over her shoulder, she pulls the horse to the stables, and bolts him into an empty space, patting his nose.

‘I’ll get you some carrots,’ she tells him, and the horse nudges her with his nose, bumping her back a few steps. Laughing, she pats his nose one final time and makes for the market proper, the Baron’s list in hand.

The haberdasher has some beautiful fabrics on her stall, and Laura lingers at the silks, her fingers not daring to touch, but longing to feel it.

‘You always stare,’ the haberdasher laughs, kindly, because she’s been here for as long as Laura’s been coming to the market.

‘One day,’ Laura says brightly, though her heart is in her stomach, ‘I’ll be able to afford many fine dresses from you!’

‘If you want,’ comes a voice from behind her, as a hand tucks into her elbow, ‘I can always come by in the night while the old girl’s asleep and steal a few metres.’

‘Pietro!’ Laura cries, but the grip Wanda has on her elbow stops her from turning too fast, ‘don’t be so positively wretched!’

Laughing, Pietro wraps an arm around her shoulders and squeezes her. It’s utterly unfair that he’s taller than her and he’s not even of age, towering a good head and shoulders above her. At least she’s taller than Wanda. It’s the little victories, even ones she has no control over.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he promises, ‘I don’t have a big enough jacket to hide it all under.’

The haberdasher, laughing, waves them off with a hand, and then calls Laura back.

‘Here,’ she says, reaching under the table and withdrawing a fat quarter of purple silk. ‘It was part of a sample, but the silly woman couldn’t make her mind up. I can’t use it for much, and I doubt you will, but here.’

Laura’s hand is shaking when she accepts the silk, and she finds herself stammering out her thanks.

‘You’re very kind,’ she says, and the haberdasher shrugs.

‘You’re a nice little thing,’ she says, ‘you remind me of a merchant I knew years ago. He was a Duke, in the end, married a nice lass. They had a little girl, last I heard.’

Laura nods, clutching the silk in her hands. ‘Happy endings are always lovely,’ she says, but she thinks maybe the happy ending wasn’t so happy.

The haberdasher gives her a sad smile, and Wanda tugs her elbow, leading her away.

‘We weren’t expecting to see you today,’ Wanda says, and Laura puts the silk into the basket on her free arm, brought to carry the Baron’s things.

‘The Baron’s given me a list,’ Laura says, and makes a rude noise when Pietro snatches it out of her hand.

‘Nonsense,’ he says, ‘what does he want these for? He is a fool.’ Turning to his sister and pulling the basket off of Laura’s arm, he says, ‘take her to tea, I’ll get the old man his things.’

‘Pietro,’ Laura protests, but he’s already disappearing into the crowd, a mess of prematurely grey hair and black coat.

She heaves a sigh. Wanda squeezes her arm.

‘You don’t want tea?’

‘I do, it’s just – it’s not right for him to do that. They’re my chores.’

‘Nonsense,’ Wanda sniffs, putting her nose in the air. ‘It keeps him out of trouble, and gives you some time to yourself. When was the last time you could say that?’

Laura concedes the point, and lets Wanda drag her to a tea shop on the far side of the plaza, through the bustling market into a pocket of quiet, surrounded by trees and plants, with young couples and business partners chattering in low tones over teapots and hearty slabs of cake.

‘I don’t know why you stay.’

‘Where else do I go?’ Laura asks, and takes the seat Wanda gestures at, the girl waving down one of the serving girls and putting in an order for tea and cake and lovely things.

‘You can stay with us,’ Wanda says, and Laura shakes her head.

‘I couldn’t impose on you like that. The Baron is – he can be unkind, but I am safe there. I was put in his care for a reason, and I shan’t deny my – benefactor – by running away.’

‘You’ll never have a life while you’re under his thumb.’

‘And I won’t have any life at all when he’s gone,’ Laura shrugs, and arranges her skirt.

It’s not a very fancy skirt, made of cheap cloth and a bit threadbare on the knee area, but it’s hers, and she takes pride in keeping it clean and mended.

Their tea arrives, and their conversation turns to other things; what the twins have been doing in town, their ill-fated attempts at entering trades, and their even more ill-fated attempts to get Pietro to stay out of trouble (as it turns out, giving him the attention of a girl is the exact opposite of a help), and Wanda talks fondly of one of the university scholars she met in the library, something of a blush on her cheeks.

‘He’s very well-read,’ she says, ‘and ever so naïve. It’s unbearable, how naïve he is, like he was born yesterday.’

‘It’s sweet,’ Laura says, ‘I’d love to have that kind of innocence back.’

Wanda gives her a look, but Laura doesn’t see it, too busy stirring milk into her tea.

‘Do you think he might be interested?’ she asks, and Wanda shrugs.

‘I’m not of age,’ she says, ‘and even if I was, I can’t see how he’s not already married.’

‘Only by a year,’ Laura tells her, ‘and if you had guardians, you’d be legally able to marry.’

‘Don’t encourage me,’ Wanda says, ‘he’s plenty handsome enough to have himself and equally handsome wife, and I don’t want to see my hopes dashed. I have nothing to offer him, besides. No dowry, no inheritance, no commodity. Just Pietro, and nobody will want the two of us.’

Laura shakes her head. ‘You don’t see Pietro the way I see him.’

‘You don’t have to see him every day.’

‘Now, that’s not very nice,’ Laura chides, and kicks Wanda under the table, gently, so as to not bruise the girl’s delicate skin.

‘Neither was that!’ the girl crows, triumphant, and kicks Laura back.

They’re still kicking each other under the table when Pietro comes trotting over, basket swinging in his hand.

‘What are you two laughing about?’ he asks, dumping the basket by Laura’s feet and dragging a chair from a nearby table, getting some disapproving sniffs from some businessmen at the next table.

‘Wanda has found love,’ Laura coos.

Pietro groans, rolling his eyes into the back of his skull. ‘Not that bookworm again! He’s _much_ too old for her.’

‘You’ll have to show him to me,’ Laura says, ‘if you see him while I’m here.’

She drains the last of her tea, and looks at the clock tower.

‘Although – I should be heading home. I have a lot of chores left to complete, and the Baron will expect me home before he leaves this evening.’

The twins looks like they want to protest.

‘The sooner I can get them done,’ Laura says, picking up the basket and getting to her feet, ‘the more time I have to myself this evening.’

‘Do you need help?’ Wanda asks.

‘No, no, I don’t – please don’t follow me home. The Baron was so unhappy when he discovered you’d been there last time!’

Pietro grunts, and heaves a sigh, gets to his feet to hug her.

‘Well, take care, and come back to town as soon as you are able.’

Laura manages to get into town most days, early in the morning, to collect necessities they don’t have at the house; milk and bread and such.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she says, and accepts the hug and cheek-kiss Wanda rocks onto her toes to offer. ‘Take care, you two. And don’t tease your sister too much, Pietro, I think this scholar of hers sounds _wonderful_.’

They start bickering as she walks away, adjusting the basket on her elbow to get the balance right; Pietro is terrible at packing things, always has been.

The horse is eager to see her, and she snaps a carrot into as small chunks as she can manage, holding them out for him to eat, getting another friendly nudge as she gets him out of the stable as thanks. After mounting and guiding him out of the gates, she sets him to a leisurely walk to get them home. They’re in no particular rush, after all; the sun is out after the rain, and her chores will still be waiting when she arrives.

 

* * *

 

Clint manages to lose the party, eventually. He doesn’t particularly _mean_ to lose them, it’s just –

Sometimes, he likes to have the peace of the woods to himself.

The boys are all caught up in debating nonsense political machinations anyway, and it’ll take them a while to get Steve to stop ranting about Pierce’s blatant disregard of the Peace Convention of the last century’s wars for them to notice Clint is gone. One of Steve’s surprising blessings is that he is – _vocal_ – about things he cares about, and people’s welfare is one of those things. Given that he is only alive these days, much to Clint’s intense displeasure of the phrasing, by Clint’s good nature giving him access to the best medical care in the kingdom, he cares a lot about those less fortunate. If he’s still alive and the cold hasn’t claimed him by the time Clint takes the throne, the prince thinks he might make Steve one of his top advisors.

Then again, putting Steve and Phil in a room together to discuss policy might make things a little less productive than he’d like; for some unknown reason, Phil is utterly awestruck by Steve. Something to do with his art, Clint thinks, and remembers the way he’d reacted to the then-boy’s drawings strewn about the prince’s playroom, where they’d spent one particularly rainy autumn day.

Shaking his head, deciding he’ll never understand what exactly goes on in other men’s heads, he taps his heels lightly and leads the horse through the woods a little ways further, just enjoying the sounds of the birdsong overhead, the settling of the leaves as the midday sun dries out the last of the rain.

Just as he’s about to turn back, figuring it was better to return to the party than to be chased and have the drama reported back to the Regent, he sees a shadow move through the trees, and something dark moves beneath his ribs. He has never truly been in danger, and he does not believe he is in danger now, but whatever it is evokes a response that he is sure should be the opposite.

Instead of turning on his horse’s shoes and bolting back to the safety of his friends, he kicks his heels and he chases it.

The shadow stays just out of reach for the longest time, some shifting, intangible thing that leaves him with leaves in his hair and dirt on his shins and coattails, but he blunders, ungainly and very, very un-princely, into a clearing, where he is met with the terrified face of a girl. No, no, a woman, full-grown and looking ready to fight him, even though she has a basket of groceries on her arm and her horse looks old and worn.

‘What?’ she asks, because there isn’t really any other word for polite conversation to convey the exact feeling of confusion written in her golden eyes.

‘I’m,’ Clint starts, and then stops, turns the horse in a circle to examine around him.

But there is nothing.

‘I should hope you are you!’ the woman says, ‘I would be worried if you were not!’

He whips his head around to look at her. She’s angled herself to flee the clearing, but she’s open to him, her face almost warm.

‘I’m terribly sorry to frighten you,’ he says, and pats his horse’s neck. It huffs at him. ‘I was – I saw a shadow in the trees, and thought it was perhaps – well. I don’t know what I thought it was.’

‘So you chased it?’ she asks, eyebrow raising, and smile forming definitely on her mouth now. ‘That’s not particularly smart, good sir.’

‘I was never known for being particularly smart,’ Clint admits with a laugh. ‘I was – perhaps it was a stag.’

‘Perhaps,’ she nods. ‘I have seen a few today. They seem frightened.’

Clint suspects that they aren’t foolish creatures, and know that the prince’s hunting party is out. He wonders whether he should tell her this.

In the end, he says, ‘have you travelled far?’

Her expression closes off, briefly, and then opens. ‘Just from town. I travel through the woods to return home.’

Clint looks in the direction she is looking, and when he looks back at her, he sees something sad, in the very corners of her mouth and in the shadows of her lashes. His steed paws at the ground, and he finds himself nudging it forwards, closer to her. She doesn’t immediately move away, and he takes that as a good sign.

‘And is home good to you?’ he asks, ‘there are paths better walked than this.’

She catches herself, and flushes high in her cheeks. She’s beautiful, in that moment. Not that she wasn’t beautiful before, but Clint has grown up around beautiful women his entire life, and has mostly learnt to tune it out. But this – this is a different kind of beauty.

‘It is as good as it needs to be,’ she says, with a tight smile. ‘I am safe, and warm, and I have food and clothes and a bath. There are some who are not so fortunate. I count my blessings every day.’

She looks away, and then reaches up to smooth back some errant curls from her chignon.

‘And what of you?’ she asks then, with something like desperation in her eyes. ‘Is your home good to you?’

At this, Clint feels a burn in his neck, and he realises that she has no idea who he is. He hadn’t even thought about it until this second, for why would she not know who he is? There are paintings of him in most towns, and he is the sole heir to the throne. She should have every reason to know who he is, and yet -

‘It is better to me than most,’ he says, ‘and I am very lucky to have the life that I live. I am an orphan, you see. And I was raised by an incredible gracious family friend.’

She nods, and Clint sees the sadness in the set of her shoulders.

‘I understand,’ she says, but doesn’t explain what, exactly, she understands. Clint thinks he knows anyway.

‘What is your name, ma’am? If I might ask?’

At this she laughs. ‘You very well may _not_ ask,’ she tells him, and Clint sits there and smiles at her.

She smiles back.

Whatever dark thing had formed beneath his ribs blossoms into something warm and bright and fills his chest until he thinks he stops breathing for the weight of it. It’s a nice feeling, but he feels drunk on it, caught in the brightness of her smile, the way one strand of hair curls at her temple, the way her eyes sparkle, the light flush in her cheeks.

Oh, he thinks, distantly. This is probably what they wanted to him to feel when they brought Natasha into the palace. Instead, he just feels fond annoyance with her, but this. This is something different entirely. Fuck.

‘What of you?’ she asks, breaking the spell, ‘have you a name?’

He smiles at her, and her flush darkens.

‘It is rude to ask someone their name if you are not willing to give them yours, ma’am,’ he tells her, and she laughs again.

‘Indeed! I suppose I deserve that.’

Clint thinks she deserves many more things than what she has, and would be so very honoured to give them to her.

Before he gets a chance to ask her anything further, to ask where she lives, why she’s travelling alone, why she looks so beautiful in the sunlight, whether she’s married, the horn sounds again.

They’ve finally noticed that he’s gone.

‘Aw, no,’ he says, and turns to look at it.

He looks back, and the woman looks frightened again, her shoulders tight and the flush gone from her face.

‘What is that?’ she asks.

‘A horn,’ he says, because he is a fool. ‘I am part of a hunting party, and got separated.’

‘Chasing a stag?’ she asks, with something like a frown. ‘What did it to do deserve to be chased so?’

‘It is – what is done, on a hunt,’ he says, feeling more the fool than ever.

‘And what if someone hunted you?’ she asks then, something burning in her lungs. ‘Just for existing, and you were hunted for fun? Not very fun, I should think. The stag does not deserve to die, good sir.’

‘No,’ he agrees. ‘We – we are not very good hunters, ma’am. For the most part, we don’t catch the big things. I might be a good shot with a bow, but I'm not very fond of killing things unnecessarily. We haven’t caught a stag, or a deer, or anything like that in months.’

It makes some of the tension melt from her shoulders, and her expression opens again.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘They will be having their babies soon, and it should be cruel to deprive the young of their family.’

She says it with a smile, but it’s sad, and Clint feels something like guilt.

‘Exactly,’ he agrees, because he does agree with it. He doesn’t need to have lost his parents to appreciate that thought. ‘You are – lovely.’

He is not very good with his words, considering his education.

Her flush returns in full force, and she’s still blushing when Sam comes thundering into the clearing, looking like he’s ready to start hollering.

‘Your High –‘

‘I’m coming!’ Clint hollers over him, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the woman, still sitting there with the loveliest face he’s ever seen, flushed and smiling at him. ‘I’m coming. I – ‘

He turns the horse around, a full circle, unsure what to do. In the end, he reaches for her hand, and doesn’t know what to do when she takes it like she’s going to shake it.

So he kisses her knuckles, notes the dry skin, the calluses on her palms. A working woman’s hands. But she’s still soft as silk, and smells just as fine as he imagines she might.

‘I should like to see you again.’

‘I – I don’t know if that will be possible,’ she says, and squeezes his fingers before letting go to take the reins again. ‘I’m very sorry. But it was lovely to meet you, sir. Even if you do refuse to tell me your name.’

And with that, she’s gone, no chance for Clint to call her back, no glance back over her shoulder. Just a kick of her heels, and a trot out of the clearing and into the trees, disappearing in only seconds.

 Sam waits almost a minute for Clint to stop staring at the space she’d disappeared into, and then says, ‘you can’t just meet a nice princess, can you?’

‘She’s _lovely_ ,’ Clint sighs, and Sam rolls his eyes.

‘Alright, come on, lovebird, Bucky’s going spare, and you know how it makes Steve get.’

Shaking himself out, Clint pulls the horse around and follows Sam back to the rest of the party, but his mind stays on that clearing for the rest of the trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's this? another fairy tale au? you absolutely bet ya ass its another fairy tale au!!! i'm back on medication and found the will to live and i return to my greatest love, making vague promises not to kill all your faves in the name of true love.
> 
> no seriously, no one's going to die this time, probably. except the villains. they can die all day long thanks


	2. Best Laid Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plans are made, sulks are had, and opportunities arise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If i'd thought about it more, i'd have made a "here's where she meets prince charming, but she won't discover that it's him until chapter three" joke, but i have never thought anything through in my life and i'm not about to start now.
> 
> It won't even be chapter three, there's more shenanigans to be had first lol
> 
> Enjoy, lovelies~!

Laura rushes the last mile home, kicking her heels and looking over her shoulder, hoping against hope that nobody is following her.

(Some small part of her hopes that maybe the blundering fool of a boy has followed her, but she thinks she’ll die before she ever admits to it.)

Both she and the horse are out of breath when they arrive back at the house, and she pulls him to a stop before dismounting, latching the gate and unhooking his saddle and reins.

‘You did good,’ she says, rifling in the basket for another carrot for him. ‘Thank you.’

He gives her a gentle nudge before accepting the vegetable and plodding off to the far side of the grounds, chomping away and scaring the chickens. For a second or two, Laura stands there watching the animals roaming, and wishes that she were that kind of free. Free as a bird, her father used to say, picking her up under the arms and spinning her around so her skirt tangled around her ankles and one of her shoes almost got lost down the well when it came flying off her foot.

‘I wish I was a bird,’ she sighs, and settles the basket in the crook of her elbow, heading for the kitchen door.

She has clothes to wash, floors to mop, chores to complete.

The Baron is in his study when she creeps past him an hour or so later, having finished washing the clothes and sheets, mop in hand. He’s reading, and doesn’t seem to notice her, but Laura has perfected the art of quietly walking, and when she comes back the other way, having finished mopping the upstairs, he’s gone from the study.

She’s used to this; used to him not saying goodbye, used to him not announcing his comings and goings and his dealings. A quick scout of the drive, and there are carriage tracks in the dirt; he’s gone.

A deep sigh of relief, and she takes a seat on the stairs for a few moments.

‘No,’ she says, when she finds herself getting too complacent with sitting there, ‘finish your chores first. Dream later.’

But as she mops the ground floor’s tiles, and sweeps the dirt from the carpets, she finds her mind wandering, finds herself humming to herself and not particularly focusing on what she’s doing.

The boy in the woods had been sweet, eyes like storms and a smile like sunshine, and he’d looked at her not as a servant, but as she imagines any girl might get looked at. The miller’s daughter, or a heiress, or anybody, really. Anybody except her. He’d been – the dreamy, romantic child in her, who remembers the love stories she used to read, who remembers the way her father had looked when talking about her mother, she thinks that he’d looked enamoured. But the realist in her, she knows that it’s just that childish part of her talking. He was just shocked to see a woman riding alone in the woods, was all. He was handsome – and much as Wanda believes of her scholar, she finds it very difficult to believe he isn’t already married, or engaged to be married.

‘Besides which, you silly girl,’ she chides herself as she finally finishes sweeping the rug in the study. ‘You’ll never see him again, so there’s no point worrying about it.’

A sigh, because she would like to see him again.

She rubs her knuckles, still warm with the phantom-touch of his mouth, and sighs again.

‘Oh, for pities’ sake!’ she cries, and throws the broom down, rushing to the door to the kitchen.

She needs a glass of water, and a bucket of it thrown over her head besides. There are plenty of handsome men in the market; the baker’s boy is a nice lad, and the merchant’s apprentice is about as good as she’ll be able to get without a dowry or even really a name. Some handsome stranger in a brocade jacket with a palomino isn’t someone she should waste her time with. He certainly wouldn’t waste his time with her, if he knew she had smeared soot on her cheek from cleaning out the fireplace. Spring it may be, with warm days, but the evenings still come in cold and fast, and the Baron isn’t one to spare the kindling. It leaves such a mess, but Laura doesn’t mind; the heat of the fire even reaches the draughty old attic.

After downing the glass of water, Laura stays in the kitchen for several minutes, looking out over the grounds. The rain has come back, fine and misty and turning everything to mud. Being alone has its perks, but sometimes she wishes she had a friend to talk to.

‘The one thing I hate most about your kindness,’ she tells whoever it was that brought her here that shadowy, rainy night, ‘is that it left me alone.’

She’d been small, and scared, and bleeding from a cut on her cheek, and she’d been bundled into a carriage with a small chest of her possessions, clothes and shoes and mementos of her family. Nothing more than she could carry, and nothing more than now lives in a box under the floorboards in the attic. Her entire life, her entire childhood, gone in one sweeping gesture of a hand helping her into a carriage in the dead of night. It had been raining heavily, no fine mists to rinse away dust. Just a downpour, fat droplets coming thick and fast, hiding how hard she was crying beneath the rumble of distant thunder.

Thinking about it now makes her throat tighten, so she downs another glass of water and whirls on her heel to finish cleaning.

It’s still light outside, what little light comes through the heavy cloud, and she’s almost done. There will be time to bemoan the loss of a handsome face and a forgone future later. She has a job to do, and she is nothing if not able.

* * *

 

Sam is still rolling his eyes by the time they get back to the palace. Steve had taken the news of a mysterious girl in the woods with the same level of gusto he usually takes such happenstances, and Bucky had offered to go off in the direction the girl had gone to see if he could catch up to her.

‘Oh, leave it,’ Clint had sighed in the end, when their needling about it got to be too much. ‘Just leave it alone. It’s none of your business.’

‘Was she pretty?’ Steve asks, as though he hasn’t asked a hundred times already, as they come in sight of the gates.

‘Beautiful,’ Clint replies, as he’s replied the last hundred times.

‘You should have seen his face!’ Sam crows, as though he has any right to be smug about it. ‘Absolutely _smitten_. The Regent is going to have a horrible time getting him to marry anybody now.’

Bucky continues to mull this over until they’ve returned to the stables.

‘Do you think she was nobility?’

‘Not a chance,’ Sam says, and watches as Clint dismounts and ducks to greet his ever-enthusiastic dog, leading him out of the stables and into the gardens proper. ‘She was dressed like a maid. Very cheap dress, apron. Horse was a low-quality breed, too. Nothing anybody with money would have.’

Steve sighs, and accepts Bucky and Sam’s arms to help him down off the horse; the rain has left his nose red and watery, and he’s shivering a little.

‘It’s a shame,’ he says, ‘I haven’t seen Clint so happy.’

The Prince has disappeared behind the wall of the garden, and they can just about hear Lucky barking. Thanking the stablehands, they venture out of the stables and towards the palace. They have their own things to return to, and Clint is safe on palace grounds. He probably needs some peace to bemoan the loss of a pretty girl to himself for a while.

‘She was very pretty,’ Sam admits, ‘a nice smile, and a strong voice. But – she’s not of breeding.’

He chews his lip, and then sighs heavily.

‘Hm?’ Steve asks, ‘what is it?’

‘Tasha,’ Sam says, and stops walking.

The other two pause too, and they stand there in one of the hallways, looking up at the paintings of the previous royals. Clint’s brother is conspicuously absent, and the painting of his parents is not particularly displayed.

‘What do you mean?’ Bucky asks, ‘what about her? She ain’t gonna marry Clint, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

‘No. No, I know that. She’d have done it by now if she was going to. But she’s – I’m never going to be able to marry her either. She’s a Grand Duchess, and I’m just – ‘

‘Just nothing,’ Steve sniffs. ‘You’re a Captain of the Guard, same as Bucky, and you know the Regent would promote you to General in a heartbeat if that’s what it took. You’ll get to marry her, Sam, don’t put yourself down.’

‘I’m not nobility,’ Sam reminds him, as though any of them have forgotten that they are just, people, floating around the palace, doing their jobs. ‘And even if Tasha’s a ward of the state, the Regent doesn’t have any authority over her marriage options.’

‘She’d abdicate,’ Steve says, and places a cold hand on Sam’s arm. ‘If that’s what it took, Sam, she’d throw her favourite tiara in a salt bath and run away with you. She loves you.’

‘I know,’ Sam says, because as anxious as he is, he has never doubted Natasha’s word. ‘And I love her. I just – what if that’s not enough?’

‘It will be!’ Bucky assures him, and slaps him on the back. ‘Don’t think any more about it. Clint’s misery in finding a bride shouldn’t be affecting you when you’ve got the only one for you already wrapped around your finger.’

‘I think you’ll find he’s wrapped around mine, you sneaky little fools,’ Natasha laughs from the doorway. ‘And Clint’s impending marriage is nothing to mock. Imagine marrying someone you weren’t in love with!’ She shudders. ‘Hideous.’

She’s resplendent as always, in a deep green gown that sits low on her shoulders with her hair piled high at the back of her head, a tiara nestled amongst the curls. She scans the boys, and then purses her lips.

‘Where is our dear Prince, anyway?’ she asks, ‘what happened on the hunt? Did you catch anything while I was wasting away at the piano?’

The boys snort; Sam goes to take her offered arm, and Steve and Bucky quietly make their excuses to leave. Steve needs to get dried off and warmed up again, and Bucky best return to his duties, lest he get an earful from the Regent. Which leaves Sam and Natasha alone to walk and sit and talk and do not a whole lot else. Natasha rests her head on Sam’s shoulder as they walk, the soft rustle of her dress and the low tap of their heels the only sounds to echo across the tiles.

‘He’s in the gardens,’ Sam says, ‘he – he met a girl, in the woods.’

‘A girl?’ Natasha asks, and laughs that laugh of hers, the one she only laughs around him. It’s soft, and real, and she snorts, a little. ‘That’s the kind of thing dreams are made of.’

‘So I hear,’ Sam nods. ‘She was very pretty.’

‘Prettier than me?’ There’s a sharp playfulness to the tone of her voice, and Sam doesn’t take it seriously.

‘Absolutely,’ he says, ‘prettiest in the land, I reckon.’

Natasha huffs, and digs her nails into his elbow, but Sam can feel the shudder of her laughter.

‘Do we know her?’

‘No, no, a maid, I think. She – I don’t think we’ll see her again.’

‘Shame. I could have given her a dress and we could have presented her as a Duchess and this whole marriage nonsense would be over.’

Sam’s turn to laugh, but his is bitter.

‘I don’t think it’ll be that easy, Tasha.’

‘No,’ she agrees with a sigh, ‘but a girl can dream. It’s tiresome, having Pierce in my ear all day long, trying to needle me into marrying Clint. I don’t want to marry him any more than he wants to marry me, and telling everybody that is the most tiresome of all.’

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he says, and pats her delicate little hands, wrapped around his arm like they never intend to let go. ‘I know better than anyone.’

‘I should hope you do!’ Natasha snorts, and pulls him to a stop. ‘Do we know anything of her? This mysterious girl in the woods. A name, a home, a – a – an occupation?’

‘Her horse was a cob,’ he says, ‘skewbald, her dress old, cheap. Like she was a maid. But she didn’t give us a name, or tell us where she was from. Maybe she said something to Clint, but he’s smitten, I don’t think he’d give up anything if he thought we’d tell the Regent.’

Rolling her eyes, exquisitely made up as ever, Natasha waves a dismissive hand. ‘He’ll talk to me. If I have to go house to house to find the girl, I’ll find her.’

Sam doesn’t doubt that she _would_ , but he wonders if she _should_.

She reaches up then, draws him down the few inches between them to press a gentle little kiss to the end of his nose.

‘Don’t worry about the Prince,’ she whispers, and bumps his nose with hers. ‘I’ll make sure he gets his happy ending, so we can get ours.’

Sam watches her for a second, and then bumps noses back.

‘I’d better report to the Regent, he’ll want to know that we’re back.’

She backs away, and as she turns, she asks, ‘Clint’s in the garden?’ At Sam’s affirmative, she swishes out of the room, and leaves just the lingering trace of her perfume.

* * *

 

Natasha finds Clint in the gardens, sitting on the edge of the fountain, Lucky bounding back and forth, dropping interesting looking stones and flowers and sticks at his owner’s feet. The gardener will go spare knowing the retriever’s had the just-bloomed narcissi, but the pup’s just doing his job, trying to cheer the Prince up in a moment where he is so visibly sad. Shoulders down, chin in his chest, fingers tracing shapes in the standing water, his countenance not one of pride and burgeoning mischief but one of morose contemplation.

For a moment, she stands there, holding her skirts up above her ankles, watching him staring at nothing and thinking everything, and then she stomps her heels to announce her presence as she slips through the little gate and latches it behind her. Lucky bounds over, jumping in circles around her and howling, the way he’s always done, and she howls back, bends her knees to give him eager belly rubs before he’s off again, bounding away to find her a stick to play with.

‘He’s a good boy,’ she says, even though she’s always been a cat person. She has a little black cat that sleeps on the end of her bed.

Sometimes she bites Sam’s toes, if he leaves them uncovered.

‘He is,’ Clint says, and doesn’t look up from his contemplation.

Sighing, Natasha tucks her skirts around her hips and takes a seat next to him, and fusses with her bodice, her tiara, her nose, examines her nails and her shoes and a loose bead on her skirt. For all intents and purposes, she’s ignoring him, the way she always ignores him. They’d been children when she arrived at the palace, and she’d stolen his breeches and a tunic, and they played with wooden swords in the training room. She’s a better fencer than he is now, but she can’t touch him on the archery range. They used to fall asleep in the library, because Clint struggled to read, and Natasha had tried to help him to little avail, used to play gaudy ditties on the piano when their music teacher was out of the room complaining to the Regent that they were unruly. Nick had called them children, reminded them that Clint was grieving, that Natasha was homesick, to give them space, to give them air.

They’ve separated in later years, their interests and training taking them to different tutors and different rooms and different schedules, but they are no less close.

After several minutes, Natasha reaches across the space between them and rests her hand on Clint’s thigh. Her rings and diamond bracelet glitter in the afternoon sunlight.

‘You want to tell me about her?’ she asks.

Something like a smile crosses Clint’s face, but it’s gone as soon as it comes.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, quiet. Clint hasn’t been quiet once in his life. ‘I’m never going to see her again, she said so herself.’

Natasha purses her lips, and waits.

‘Alright, alright, she said it was unlikely that we’d see each other again, but I know that even if I camped out in the woods for a month, she’d make sure I’d never see her. That’s how girls are.’

She gives him that, because girls are like that, but she doesn’t think he should be so confident in saying that about this girl.

‘If you’re sure,’ she says, with that specific sniff she does when she doesn’t think he’s sure at all.

Clint goes back to staring at nothing, and his posture sags, aging him immensely.

Natasha hates this, hates the silence and the aching awkwardness. She’s never been good at the small talk, the feelings and the emotions and the gooey nature of human hearts. Sam tells her he loves her, and she can almost bring herself to say it in words. He knows, and she makes sure he knows, but words, genuine heartfelt words not crafted for a politician’s table, those are words she isn’t good with. She tries, and she struggles, but she tries.

So she goes with what she knows; upfront, simple. The exact same thing she asked Sam.

‘Do we know anything about her?’

Clint gives her a look.

‘I know she’s the most lovely thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he says, at length. ‘Even lovelier than your ugly cakehole.’

Natasha barks out a laugh and kicks him in the shin. The little anklet she wears (a gift from Sam, because nobody except Sam has the grace of seeing her ankles in these dresses she wears) jingles. The maids think it’s the cat. Sam is not quite stoic enough to keep his face straight when Natasha sends them on wild goosechases to find the black monstrosity with the most genuine sincerity anybody has ever seen.

He has mastered a fake cough to cover his laughter, though.

‘Sam said that,’ she tells him. ‘Not the ugly cakehole part, because he’s a nice boy with nice manners, unlike _you_. But he said she was the prettiest girl in the land.’

‘Sam has good taste,’ Clint says, and doesn’t even arch his brow. Then he sighs, wistful and full of all the awful romance Natasha professes to loathe but still reads books full of the damnable stuff. ‘She _is_ lovely tho, Nat. She’s – lovely.’

His hands flail a bit, helpless in the face of a word so wide and encompassing that he comes unstuck.

‘Who do we know lives around the woods?’ she asks, and turns her attention to the sky.

It looks like rain.

‘Plenty of people. She’s a servant, we’ll never find her. And what would we say? Oh, hello there, I’m only the Crown Prince looking to marry your servant girl because she’s really very pretty and I’d quite like to hold her hand.’

It’s the most innocent thing she’s ever heard, and the sheer purity of it almost breaks her heart.

‘Clint,’ she starts, but the Prince leaps to his feet, his cheeks and ears red.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, too loud, and making a bird tweet at him from a nearby topiary, ‘it doesn’t. Nick’ll find some other Duchess for me to marry, and it won’t matter at all. I won’t see her again.’

Natasha purses her lips some more. She’s been doing that a lot lately, and she wonders if it’ll give her wrinkles instead of laughter lines.

She heaves a sigh when there’s nothing she can think of to say that she either hasn’t already said or achieves absolutely nothing.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ she offers, because Clint is waiting for her to say something. ‘I think you will see her again. Give me a day or two to work it out, and I’ll make sure of it.’

That aching, weighty sadness that sits on his shoulders lifts a little then. Natasha watches him unfold, just a little, his spine straightening, his chin lifting. It’s such a minute change, so tiny that anybody who didn’t know him wouldn’t notice, but Natasha knows him better than anyone. She sees that hope and she takes it, tucks it into her corset for later use.

‘It looks like rain,’ she tells him then, and as if on command, the first fat raindrops begin to fall.

‘You’ll ruin your dress,’ he replies, and extends his hand for her to take.

Once she’s on her feet, he shrugs out of his jacket and holds it over her head.

‘Thank you,’ he says, quiet, and she gives him a nudge with her elbow, hikes her skirts to rush up the stairs and inside, where it’s dry and safe.

* * *

 

The rain turns heavy after an hour’s worth of on-off misty nonsense, and Laura had brought the washing in, knowing it’ll never dry on the line, set it up in the kitchen to let the stove’s heat dry it.

Then she’d gone and sat in the rain, because that was the kind of mood she was in.

Acknowledging that she wanted to see the man in the woods again had brought with it a melancholy she couldn’t shake, no matter what ditties she sang to herself, no matter what jobs she undertook to distract herself. Everything she thought, everything she sang, all came back to this vague stirring of romance deep in her breast.

‘Silly girl,’ she chides herself for the fifteenth time in barely twice as many minutes.

She’ll get sick, sitting out here in the rain, but it’s nice. Cool on her flushed cheeks.

Not for the first time, she wonders about running away. Whatever she had been taken away from, whatever secret she had created by being hidden, that surely can’t matter now. It’s been a decade or more, and nobody in the house has asked after her. The old cook, who’d taken her under her wing when she first arrived, before the Baron slowly began removing any staff that wasn’t Laura, she’d not batted an eyelash at the new servant girl, who spoke with the gentle eloquence of breeding, who’s dress was too nice to be as low-bred as she was claiming. Laura doesn’t really remember it, had been a child. But she’d been taken away from her home. And if nobody’s found her yet, maybe they’ve stopped looking.

She hasn’t seen her benefactor since that night, and she doubts she ever will again.

So what’s to stop her? It’s not like there’s some magical spell keeping her here, some blessing from a fairy godmother that only applies to the house. It doesn’t work like that, magic isn’t real. She’s cried too much to believe that magic is real any more.

But she believes in the goodness of man, and she supposes that’s what it is. Someone had done something daring and dangerous and expensive, and had done it for her well-being, and it wouldn’t be very nice of her to spit in the face of that kindness.

‘I wish you’d given me a friend, though,’ she says.

From behind her, Pietro says, ‘and what am I? Chopped liver?’

Laura is not ashamed to admit she screams at the top of her lungs, and topples off the fence she’d been perched on, landing full-force in the mud of the path.

Wanda is howling. Pietro is howling. Laura is trying not to cry at the bruise on her coccyx.

‘You’re horrible!’ Wanda hollers at her brother, slapping at his arms, his hands slapping back to try and deflect her.

‘Can we just get inside before we all get sick?’ he asks, and climbs over the fence, because the gate five feet away is obviously too far away, and he’s clearly been practicing how to vault, because he does it with absolutely no grace or finesse but a lot of pride.

Wanda goes to the gate, and is still tutting as Pietro helps Laura to her feet.

‘I’m sorry for scaring you,’ he says.

Laura rakes her hair back, smearing mud next to the soot on her cheek. ‘You shouldn’t be here! The Baron will – ‘

‘We’ll be gone long before the Baron gets back,’ Wanda assures her. ‘We just wanted to help you, was all. You left in such a rush, and now you need a bath, and I’ll bet you haven’t eaten yet today.’

As if on cue, Laura’s stomach rumbles. She’d eaten a little, earlier, but she hasn’t eaten anything substantial. She never does.

‘There, see?’ Pietro says, and starts herding her back to the house. ‘Hungry! You need us here. Wanda knows how to draw a bath.’

‘That explains a lot,’ Laura murmurs under her breath, and Pietro asks her what she said. ‘I said thank you.’

‘I thought so. Wanda brought food for us all. We’ll make you dinner.’

Even though she will get in trouble for it – the Baron always seems to know when the twins have snuck in, no matter how well their tracks are covered – she finds herself immensely cheered by their presence. They’re orphans themselves, remnants of the war that killed the king and queen. Orphans, she thinks, like the man in the woods. They’re all orphans, these days. But they’ve made a life for themselves in town, working odd jobs around the market and local farms, doing what they need to survive. Laura wonders if there is some kind of history with the Baron, because he has a particularly vehement hatred of them that she doesn’t think is necessary for mere strangers, but any attempt to ask will earn her the back of his hand or his cane to the back of her legs, and so she’s stopped asking about it.

Pietro is a nuisance, and Wanda can be too serious, but they’re great company, and Laura has been so lonely of late.

‘You’ve got a look on your face,’ Wanda says, as Pietro goes off in search of the in bath tub Laura uses, and laughs when Laura blushes. ‘Tell me.’

Laura relays what happened in the woods earlier, the man and the kiss to her hand, and the exact shade of blue of his eyes and she is so visibly besotted that Wanda just keeps laughing.

‘You’re sweet,’ she says, and Laura’s flush darkens. ‘Are you going to see him again?’

‘I don’t see how it’s possible,’ Laura sighs. ‘He’s an orphan, but his coat was brocade, and he had a palomino. The Baron can’t afford a palomino.’

‘But he said he was hunting, yes? Perhaps if you try again next week. Men are creatures of habit.’

Laura is not convinced, and says as much.

‘Even if he did go hunting the same time every week – Wanda, he won’t be interested in me. Even if he’s not already married, he won’t be interested.’

Wanda tuts at her, and Laura heaves a sigh.

‘I think it’s worth trying,’ Wanda says.

Pietro comes clattering back into the kitchen with the tin bath, and they usher Laura upstairs to her bedroom to get a change of clothes while they get her a bath ready.

* * *

 

After dining, Natasha goes to find Steve. He’s still red-nosed and sniffly, but he’s wearing one of Bucky’s coats over his own clothes, and has one of the maid’s shawls over the top of that.

‘You’re adorable,’ Natasha says, and tucks herself into the space next to him at the table.

He’s drawing, but Steve is always drawing. It’s very good, a watercolour from memory based on a sketch next to him, of Clint and Sam bantering. Their hands are in motion, their faces open, their coats bright in the sunlight.

‘Piss off,’ he says.

‘Is that any way to talk to a Grand Duchess?’ she replies.

He kicks her under the table, and she kicks him back. It’s not a very nice thing to do to a Grand Duchess, but Natasha has been very bad at doing Grand Duchess-like things.

‘I need your help,’ she says, after waiting for him to finish the bit he’s doing and put his paintbrush down.

Steve looks at her.

‘Sam said you’d had a thought.’

‘I know, it’s terribly shocking. I need a map of the kingdom.’

For a moment, Steve is silent, considering what Natasha is asking. It isn’t like she can’t have one, and it isn’t like she can’t find one herself, she knows where the library is.

‘What are you planning?’ he asks her.

‘This mystery girl of Clint’s,’ she says, and leans back in her chair.

She’s been ready for bed for about two hours, but waiting until she knows Steve will have eaten and settled in to do whatever he wants before Bucky bullies him to rest has taken longer than she expected. As such, she’s been swanning about, as Natasha is wont to do, because she is a Grand Duchess and if she wants to swan, she’ll have the longest neck in the kingdom, just watch her, in her nightgown and an incredibly decadent-looking robe that is utterly unbefitting for her to be swanning about. But swanning she is.

Steve gives her the same cursory look that he always gives her when she moves, because he’s likened Natasha to a cat, a very calculating one, who knows how she moves and how to make herself appealing in every instance, and the artist in him looks at her out of an itching finger curiosity. He couldn’t be less interested in her if he tried, but he always wants to paint her.

‘What about her?’

‘I think we could find her. Clint said she lived on the other side of the woods, and I know there are some big houses that way. They’ll have servants.’

‘We’re not going door to door knocking to see who answers,’ Steve says, because if he dismisses it, it’ll mean someone has.

 ‘I’m not saying that, I’m saying we’ll see what the list of servant girls is around the woods.’

‘And then?’

‘I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I want to see if it’s possible she’s _there_ , and not just some lying floozy trying to start up some trouble.’

‘You’ve been talking to the Regent too much,’ Steve tells her, because Nick has been on the spy-trying-to-cause-trouble train for as long as anyone can remember.

‘He has a point,’ Natasha says, ‘and I’m not about to get Clint’s hopes up for a spy.’

Steve rolls his eyes. She’s roping him into this because she knows he can’t resist this kind of thing. He doesn’t get to play hero very much, isn’t part of the guard, and won’t be part of the council until Clint’s on the throne, because Pierce has opposed all of Clint’s attempts to get him onto the council thus far.

Helping Clint find the girl he’s besotted with would be a boost to his credentials, if nothing else.

‘You’re vile,’ he tells her, and finishes rinsing his paintbrush off. ‘Come on, we’d better get to the library before the maids try to enforce curfew.’

There isn’t a curfew, but it never stops them.

* * *

 

Clint goes to bed early in a sulk. No, sulk is not quite the right word. But he is morose, the afternoon’s rain extending into the evening, and he lies in bed watching the rain sparkling on the balcony doors, Lucky snoring and kicking at dream-rabbits on the other side of the bed. Natasha hadn’t said a word to him for the rest of the day, and Sam had denied all accountability, but of course he had. The Captain is a good man, but he’s utterly enamoured of her.

He’s tired of saying lovely, but he can’t think of any other word to describe the girl _besides_ lovely. She was beautiful, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and he can’t get the warmth of her smile out of his mind, the way her soft voice, the eloquence to the way she talked, the way it settled in his belly like warm soup at the end of a cold day. His mouth is still tingling with the feel of her skin, his fingers itching to hold her hand again. She’d squeezed his fingers and it had been so very, very nice.

Cursing, he throws himself out of bed and goes to stand by the balcony doors, watching the raindrops race each other down the glass.

‘You’re a foolish boy,’ he tells his faint reflection, and the reflection shrugs.

What to do? Natasha had said to let her think on it for a couple of days, to concoct some kind of palatable plan to find out who the girl was, and he trusts her to find a way to manage it. It seems an impossible feat, but Natasha is also a girl, and they are a strange creature of ways and means he will never understand.

She’ll bat her eyelashes at the Regent and Nick will give her whatever she asks for, because Nick adores her in that way Nick has where he never actually lets on that he has any feelings at all, which is for the best, because neither Clint nor Natasha are very good at dealing with their own feelings, never mind someone else’s.

But suppose she fails? What then? What does he do then? Give up on the hope of finding someone to love that he might also marry, and not the other way around? He doesn’t want to marry a woman he loathes, just to secure his throne. He doesn’t particularly want to marry at all, doesn’t particularly want to have the fate of an entire kingdom rest on whose ring he wears.

 If the lady is a servant, then he doubts she’ll have a dowry, and her ring would not be worth much.

And he finds, as he watches the dim lantern of one of the night patrol work its way around the garden, that he doesn’t mind in the least.

He’s grateful for the education, the food, the clothes, the wealth that Nick has kept in the kingdom to give him the best childhood that he could have had, in the aftermath of Charles running and their parents dying, but he finds himself happiest in old breeches and helping the gardener, or the decorator. He’d asked, as a young teen, whether he could apprentice to the tradesmen that came to the castle, and Nick had been too engaged in forcing Clint to sit in on political discussions and other such kingly duties to allow it. But Clint had snuck out to visit them during his free time. He’s not a bad carpenter now. Better carpenter than he is painter, but that’s why he keeps Steve around.

As the lantern comes back around, he takes a breath.

Tomorrow, he will go back to the woods, and he will see if the most beautiful girl in the kingdom is there. He’ll get her name, if he can. But to just see her again, to see that curl of hair against her temple, to feel the calluses on her palms, that would be enough.

‘Yes,’ he tells his reflection, standing straight with its chin up and shoulders back, looking too pale and too blue in the eyes, ‘that’s what I’ll do.’

And with that, he turns back to his bed, and goes to sleep.

* * *

 

Laura is in the tub, behind the folding screen kept against the chimney for when she wants to bathe, listening to the twins bicker and sing and cook food. It smells fantastic, something with fish and they’ve been bickering about how to make dumplings for the last five minutes. Pietro has opinions about Wanda’s technique, and she has opinions about his entire face, and it’s been going like that the entire time.

Her mood has lifted considerably just listening to them. They fill the kitchen with their laughter and their squalling, and it’s almost like having the staff back. They’d been a mostly calm bunch, but prone to raucous nonsense when they were left alone in the kitchen for long enough. The cook had been a great presence, all blonde curls and waving fork, and she’d had a great many things to say about Laura’s dirty feet when she’d played outside without her shoes.

But, like the rest of the staff, she’d been put out on her ear when Laura was old enough to lift a wet bedsheet over the line by herself. She’s found work in one of the other houses, last Laura heard, and she’s happy enough there; the couple she works for are a gentle pair, childless. It’s very sad, but their staff are well cared for.

 ‘Have you drowned?’ Pietro calls, and his silhouette appears against the screen.

‘Pietro!’ Wanda chides, but Laura stays quiet, biting the inside of her cheeks, for long enough that she then asks, ‘ _have_ you drowned?’

At that, Laura bursts out laughing, and splashes the screen with a handful of water.

‘No! I’m quite alright, just enjoying the noise.’

‘I’ve never heard anyone enjoy Pietro’s noise,’ Wanda hums, and Pietro’s shadow moves before he makes a very rude noise with his mouth.

‘Well, I enjoy it,’ Laura tells her. ‘It’s quiet here, most of the time. I get birds on the windowsill to sing with, but otherwise it’s. It’s just me. And it can be very quiet.’

The twins can’t think of a reply to this, and so they continue on their work, back to bickering about dumplings and how much they should have stuffed the fish, and Laura sinks a little deeper into the tub. It makes her knees cold, but she can rest her head, and think about how she needs to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling.

They’ll have to go soon, and she’ll go to bed in the attic, cold and alone, and she’ll write in her journal about the man in the woods. He’s a boy, really, but his bearing makes him a man, she thinks, and wonders if he’d think her a girl or a woman. She doesn’t feel like either, never has. Not that it matters, he wouldn’t write about her in a journal one way or the other.

‘Laura? Are you ready to get out? We’re almost done here.’

She blinks, finds that she’d started to doze, and shuffles upright in the tub.

‘Yes, yes, um – just a minute, please.’

Wanda hums an agreement, and there’s the rattle of cutlery and plates, and audible shoving. Laura scrubs herself clean quickly, and the tiles are cold beneath her feet when she gets out of the tub, drying off as fast as she can to get dressed. Wanda had thrown clean clothes over the top of the screen for her, and she’s grateful for them. Just as she’s folding the screen away to drag the tub to the door to empty it, the twins are tutting and putting plates piled high on the table.

‘Leave it,’ Pietro tells her, ‘we’ll deal with that, you sit and eat. You look like you’re about to fall over.’

‘Well, if you hadn’t overfilled the bath!’ Wanda tells him, and they squabble some more as they set about hauling the tub outside.

Laura feels a knot of guilt in her belly as she sits in the seat Wanda points her to, and waits for them to return before eating.

‘You don’t have to wait!’ Pietro snorts.

‘It’s manners,’ Laura protests, and Pietro flicks a pea at her.

The table jumps with Wanda kicking him, and it’s so like what Laura imagines a family dinner would be like that she almost tears up. Almost, but she doesn’t think she has many tears left to shed, and this isn’t worth wasting them.

The twins have snuck in a few times before, but they’ve never had the time to make her a full meal before, and Laura dreads the sound of carriage wheels outside, dreads having to say hushed goodbyes to them and distract the Baron so they have time to get over the fence and back into the woods.

It shouldn’t have to be like this, she thinks, and then blinks; Wanda is looking at her, expectant.

‘Sorry?’

‘I said, it shouldn’t have to be like this,’ Wanda repeats, quiet. ‘This skulking around, and you being by yourself here. It’s not right. Run away, come live with us.’

‘I can’t,’ Laura says, ‘I – ‘

‘Someone brought you here, I know,’ Wanda nods. It’s not an unfamiliar conversation. ‘But that doesn’t make it right for you to stay! Your parents wouldn’t have wanted this for you. You should be married to a nice boy by now, and I should have godchildren. Maybe with that nice boy you saw in the woods.’

Laura spits out a mouthful of water with her laughter, and nearly chokes on the last of it caught in her throat.

‘Wanda!’ she cries. ‘That’s not – I’m not -  oh, stop laughing!’

They finish their meal in peace, and have nearly finished cleaning up when the Baron returns.

‘Drat!’ Laura whispers, because there are many other words she’d like to say, but they aren’t nice words. ‘Go, go, I’ll finish this. Get out of here before he sees you.’

Pietro presses a sloppy, hard kiss to her forehead, and Wanda presses a softer one to her cheek and they’re taking off. She’s glad they haven’t argued this time, and she wipes her hands off on the apron hung on the hook, rushes up the stairs into the foyer, just in time for the door to open and the Baron to come sweeping in.

‘You better have cleaned!’ he barks, tosses his hat and coat at her.

She fumbles to catch them and half-bows. ‘Yes, sir. The last of the curtains are just drying now.’

‘I expect company tomorrow, and I don’t want to see hide nor hair of you, you hear?’

Then who will serve tea, she wonders, but nods instead.

‘Yes, sir. I shall go into town. We are low on soap.’

The Baron sniffs, and Laura breathes a little easier; he hasn’t opposed it.

She’ll buy soap, certainly, and other things besides, but she’ll linger in the woods, she thinks. Climbing the stairs to the attic, and pausing at the window to overlook the palace, so regal in the moonlight and last of the evening’s rain, she thinks that yes. Yes, she’ll linger in the woods, and perhaps there will be another hunt tomorrow. If not, she’ll take the long road home, and if there is, well, she’ll just have to find the stags herself.


	3. Here's Where She Meets Prince Charming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It might be chapter three, but that doesn't mean she realises that it's him.
> 
> Clint and Laura go on a date, and it's lovely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied, i got to make the joke after all.
> 
> warning for strucker existing and making a mess of things
> 
> enjoy my lovelies!!!

 

He almost feels bad, because it’s dark outside, and he’d left a note under Bucky’s door (Steve’s door, but Bucky can _always_ be found there, whether he thinks he can or not) and nothing else to indicate he was going anywhere. He’d woken, stared at the ceiling for exactly four seconds before bolting upright and rushing into the bathroom. He’d had the quietest, quickest strip-wash, and had the most enthusiastic argument with a pair of breeches he thinks he’s ever undergone.

He’d _made himself presentable_ , for Christ’s sake. Clint doesn’t make himself presentable for foreign dignitaries, much to Nick’s chagrin, and that one King’s advisor’s delight. Heimdall seems an alright chap, and Clint wonders if maybe he might cultivate some kind of friendship with the Asgardian kingdom when he’s on the throne. They seem a decent sort, even if the King tells the worst jokes he’s ever heard.

Either way! Clint has made an _effort_ , and he almost feels bad.

But it’s not like he’s wasting his effort on nothing, after all. He has a plan, and it involves his favourite shirt, and a picnic basket he doesn’t remember asking for.

He also doesn’t remember asking for it to be attached to Natasha’s outstretched hand.

‘You must think I’m stupid,’ she says, with a smile.

Her hair is down for once, a tangled, tumbling mess of curls that look perfect even in their pre-dawn shadows. Clint doesn’t comment on her choice of attire, because it’s not like she’ll be ashamed of wearing Sam’s coat over her nightdress, which he is fairly certain is in fact _Sam’s_ nightshirt. The maids have been tearing their hair out but Natasha is untameable.

‘No,’ he says, because he thinks a lot of things of her, but stupid is not one.

‘I put food that she’ll be used to in there,’ she says, ‘if she is a servant, she won’t want a Prince’s picnic.’

Clint nods. He hates the picnics that the cooks pack for him, so it’s a blessing. Give him easy to eat snacks that he can eat one-handed any day of the week. He remembers, vividly, the only family picnic that he ever went on with his parents and brother, and the utter agony that had been eating with a _fork_ and his mother had tucked a napkin under his chin. Awful.

‘Thank you,’ he says, and she smiles, reaches up to flick his ear.

‘There was some soap.’

He gives her a look, but she just keeps on smiling. A meow from her ankle, and she ducks to pick her cat up, depositing the ball of fluff on her shoulder like it’s a parrot. The cat stays there, too, that’s the worst part.

‘Go back to bed,’ he says, ‘before he realises you’ve gone.’

‘Does anyone know?’ she asks.

‘I left a note for Bucky. Delay them, if you can.’

‘Obviously. Godspeed.’

And with that, he legs it.

Lucky is still in his chambers, having been asleep when Clint got up, and he had no intention of exciting the pup into waking half the household. He creeps into the stables, saddles up his horse, and is gone before anyone can think to look.

* * *

 

Laura wakes with the dawn chorus, and leaps out of bed. She’s still smelling of soap from last night’s bath, even if the back of her legs sting from the cane the Baron had put in his hand when he saw that the twins had been in the house again. She’d delayed him as much as possible, but he wasn’t a fool, and she’d born the punishment with as much pride as she’d been able to muster. She does some stretches, and she dresses, and hurries downstairs as fast as she can. She shoves some bread in her mouth, and sets about making up the Baron’s morning tea, rushing about the place to get her early morning chores done. She wants to be in the woods ready for mid-morning, if the hunt is there. And if not, well, she’ll deal with it.

But she wants to be there.

As soon as the bell rings, she’s ready, and barely spills the tea at all when she rushes up the stairs.

‘You’ve been making a racket,’ he tells her.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she says, with a bow of her shoulders. ‘I want to be ready to go as soon as the guests arrive. I have lunch prepared already, it just needs to be put in front of the fire.’

The Baron purses his lips in the shadow of his bed, and then takes a sip of his tea, and dismisses her.

‘You’ll have the usual errands to run,’ he says, ‘don’t think that you have a free day.’

‘Of course not, sir,’ she says, and as she rushes down the stairs to finish up her chores and saddle the horse, she wonders just who he has visiting that makes him not want her around.

To her knowledge, he has never served a guest so much as a cup of tea before, and now he’s intending to serve and entire meal? Madness.

Still, she’ll have time to wait in the woods before going to the market, and she even has enough coin in her purse to buy herself some lunch while she’s out.

All in all, a good day.

* * *

 

When the Regent receives word that the Prince is gone – and not a breath of a word from anybody who might know something, despite the very guilty look on Captain Barnes’ face, and the guileless sincerity on Natasha’s – he goes.

Well, he doesn’t go spare.

But he goes absolutely spare.

And tells them not to look for him.

‘If he gets himself killed, it’s his own damn fault,’ he says, and Phil nearly has a fit.

* * *

 

Clint goes back to the clearing, though the sun is high by the time he finds it again. Most of yesterday’s rains have cleared away, and have left only dew on the leaves as a sign it was there, which is perfectly fine by him, because he has a good blanket, and he’s not afraid to take his coat off for the lady to sit on either.

He smoothes a hand over his hair, tugs at his coat, taps his hands against his thighs, nerves beginning to set in. What if she doesn’t come by? It would make sense, of course, that she would, because there are things that you should buy fresh every day, and it would make sense for her to come through this way, but what if she sees him through the trees? What if she doesn’t want to see him again and takes a different route?

‘I’m not unlikeable,’ he tells the back of his horse’s head. ‘Am I? I’m alright.’

He can be a brat, but he’s not had anyone complain about his behaviour for a few years now, and the Regent thinks he’s smart enough to rule. He’s handsome enough, even if his ears stick out a bit and he’s never been able to really shake the baby-face, and he gets freckly in the summer. The only lesson of his mother’s that really stuck was to not swear around ladies, and he’s pretty good at that, even if he does slip up around Natasha and a couple of the coarser maids.

 He picks at his nails for a moment, and turns the horse around, wondering if maybe he should just give up, when he hears a branch snap across the clearing.

Hand going to his sword, carried more for show than use – he’s much more proficient and comfortable with his bow – he turns back, ready to fight or flee, depending on what made the noise.

He’s heard of wolves, and Phil had warned of bandits, the skewbald that comes through the trees bears the loveliest girl in the world, and he feels himself both relax and tense at once. His heart jumps and flounders and lurches in his chest, the rhythm as _a capriccio_ as one of Natasha’s impromptu piano pieces (which are almost exclusively ones to miss, given that the girl had no sense of composition) and dries his mouth out.

‘Hello,’ he manages to say, though it isn’t said very well.

The girl seems as surprised to see him as he is to see her, and the smile that takes a second to break across her face might have killed a lesser man. Clint likes to think that he’s not a lesser man, but he’s pretty sure he might die if his heart doesn’t stop.

‘Hello,’ she replies, and taps her heels, pulls the horse into the clearing until she’s almost, almost in arm’s reach.

There’s a high flush on her cheeks, and the way her gaze darts across his face, the way she swallows, he thinks maybe her heart is doing the same as his. He hopes it is. He licks his lips, and takes a breath, and laughs, once.

‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he admits. ‘I thought – well, you said.’

She laughs then, a soft little giggle that makes him want to do more than hold her hand, and brushes a strand of hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear.

‘I didn’t expect to see you, either, sir,’ she says, and her eyes shine gold in the sun.

He wants to wake up to those eyes for the rest of his life.

‘I – I – I brought lunch,’ he offers, and hates how it sounds like a question. ‘A picnic. If you’re – hungry.’

He raises the basket, and she looks taken aback before smiling some more. Wars could be fought over that smile, he thinks. He’d fight a war for it, he knows.

‘That’s lovely,’ she says, and casts her gaze to the grass. ‘I think the sun has had time to dry the grass, perhaps?’

She looks at him again, and he almost trips when he dismounts too fast, making her laugh again.

‘Don’t laugh,’ he chides, though there’s nothing mean in his tone. ‘I should think every man trips over himself around you. You’re lovely.’

At this, she laughs, and it’s the most lovely ugly laugh he’s ever heard, a real belly laugh where you get tears in your eyes and sniffle and generally make unattractive noises.

‘Never in my life,’ she admits when she’s done. ‘No man’s ever noticed me to trip over himself.’

Clint had been doubled over to put a hand on the grass, to check if the sun had indeed dried it, but uses the hand to brace himself when he looks up at her, sharp.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘Nobody’s ever noticed you? I refuse to believe that.’

‘I can guarantee you,’ she says, and that sad smile is back, just for a heartbeat, and then it’s gone again. ‘If they have noticed me, I haven’t noticed them.’

He thinks that is far more likely, and nods to himself before finishing his task.

‘The grass is dry,’ he tells her, straightening, ‘but I have a blanket all the same.’

Blanket down, and basket in the middle, he goes to offer her his hand, and tries not to embarrass himself when she takes it to dismount. She’s a little clumsy, clearly born of practical experience rather than grace, but her little hop to balance herself is adorable, and he tightens his grip until she’s steady on her feet. She’s a good head shorter than him, small and elegantly dainty and he could pick her up and spin her around and not feel any ache at all, and he wants to do so very much.

But he doesn’t, because he’s a gentleman, and instead helps her sit, and takes a seat opposite her, on the other side of the basket.

‘I must admit,’ he says, ‘I don’t know what Natasha packed. She said it was a simple lunch, but we have very different ideas.’

‘Natasha?’ she asks. There’s something in her eyes that he finds he doesn’t like.

‘A dear friend of mine,’ he says, ‘she’s like a little sister, and about as annoying, I’m sure.’

‘Oh.’

Silence lingers for a minute then, and he casts about for something, anything, to say. In the end, he reaches for the basket, and pulls out plates, cut sandwiches, pies and pastries and a bottle of wine.

‘This looks wonderful,’ she says, ‘perfectly simple. You’ll have to give her my thanks; I don’t think I’ve ever had a picnic before.’

‘Never?’

‘Well, not since I was a little girl, I don’t think. If I had one at all, it was before – before my parents died.’

He’d thought she was an orphan; the war had produced many, many orphans.  

‘The war?’ he asks, because he might be a Prince and a politician, but he’s not one made of tact.

‘I – you know. I don’t really remember. I have friends, who are war orphans. But I – it’s ever so funny, my mother died when I was very young, and my father died when I was a little girl, but I don’t remember what killed him. I have been working in the house ever since.’

‘Your house?’ he asks, because it’s more of a clue than none at all.

Surely there must be a house or two with no current heads.

But the question startles her; her eyes go wide, and she swallows thickly before perking up to tell him that the pastries are delicious.

‘They must be freshly made.’

‘Yes,’ he says, because he might not be tactful, but he knows to back off. Phil would almost be proud of him. It’s worse than a political negotiation, because he actually has a vested interest in the conversation. ‘Our cooks are fantastic.’

‘Not better than my Angie, though, I’m sure,’ she says, with what he might have thought was too much pride, if she didn’t look so lovely with pastry crumbs on her lip.

‘Angie?’

‘Mm, she makes these delicious little flatbreads in town, she’s there every day, and if you ask her nicely, she’ll put extra cheese on top.’

Clint is a glutton for cheese. And bread. And good food.

‘Will you show me?’ he asks, ‘I haven’t been into town for a very long while.’

Her nose wrinkles. ‘You’re missing out! But of course, sir, it was where I was planning on having lunch before you brought this.’

Clint smiles at her, and she smiles back, and he does his best to not choke on the mouthful of pie when he swallows before he’s done chewing.

She laughs at him, which makes her choke on the last of her pastry, and then they’re laughing at each other and the world seems that little bit more –

Worthwhile.

* * *

 

The cooks screech about the missing cold cuts and fresh pastries, and try to pin it on Bucky, who has the misfortune of having half a pastry in his mouth at the time.  

‘This is Steve’s,’ he says, spraying pastry crumbs and plum jam everywhere like the savage he pretends not to be, ‘he didn’t finish it.’

Phil tries his best to placate them, doing his gentle hand-waving, fatherly-concern-toned thing, and reminds them that the Prince is currently not in the palace, and what’s to say he’s not taking a picnic to the woods?

‘You’re going to get yourself into trouble,’ Natasha tells him as the cooks go back to the kitchen, bickering amongst themselves at who was stupid enough to leave the kitchen empty when they know the Prince can’t resist pastry.

Phil looks at her from the corner of his eye, hands neatly behind his back, shoulders back chin up, a picture perfect advisor. ‘You must think of your own safety, Grand Duchess,’ he tells her. ‘I didn’t like the look of that rolling pin Madam Fry had in her hand.’

Natasha tilts her head to look at him from under her eyelashes, and they share half a smile before going about their days.

* * *

 

Once they’ve cleared their plates, leaving only crumbs and jam-marked handkerchiefs behind, Clint packs up the basket, swatting at the girl’s hands when she makes to help.

‘Not at all,’ he says, ‘you don’t lift a finger.’

She actually pouts at him. Full on pouts, like Natasha used to when she didn’t get her way on the archery range. Then she sits on the blanket and refuses to move.

Clint is –

He’s in love.

He narrows his eyes at her, and she raises her brows back at him, and they both fold their arms. He purses his lips, she sticks her tongue out.

‘My mother taught me not to swear at ladies,’ he says, and wags a finger.

‘Then it is a good job I’m not a lady,’ she retorts, and puts her nose in the air to utterly ignore him.

Her eyes shut against the sun, but he catches her peeking from the corner of one to see what he’s doing, and then yelps when he yanks the blanket, quick as a whippet, out from under her. She tumbles, rolling into the grass, and lies there laughing. He’s not quite done folding it when she scrambles to her feet and tackles him. She’s barely heavy enough to stagger him, but the shock of it makes him stumble, and the wind gets knocked out of him when they land on the grass.

She’s laughing, and he thinks he’ll take the grass stains for the rest of his life.

‘Right!’ he cries, and they slap at each other for a second while he tries to get a grip on her. ‘Right! You’ve earned this!’

Cackling, she demands to know what she’s earned, and then abruptly stops laughing when he flips her, kneeling on her skirt so she can’t flee. They watch each other for a second, something defiant and terrified in her face. To stop it, he tickles the living daylights out of her. Her laughter makes his ears hurt, but it’s worth every second, and she clutches at his arms, begs him to stop, cries mercy, and he only stops when she can no longer laugh.

‘There!’ he says, rocking back onto his haunches so she can catch her breath. ‘Suitably punished.’

She lays there, chest heaving, and points a finger at him.

‘Cruel,’ she gasps. ‘The cruellest. I would never.’

‘No, you’ll break my back!’ he crows, and offers her his hands so she can get up.

‘Get out of it,’ she snorts, slapping his hands away and rolling over to do it herself.

He catches a glimpse of her calves as she does so, sun-warm with several stinging welts across the skin. He’s not unfamiliar with a cane, and the sight of it, after a decade or more without his father’s hand, makes him seethe. It takes her only a second, as she straightens, but she senses the change, because she whips around, tugs her skirt as low as she can get it.

‘I,’ she starts, and Clint forces himself to take a breath.

‘Who hurt you?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, ‘I broke a very important rule, and I got the punishment I was owed.’

 ‘There is no rule to break worth that,’ he tells her, and she swallows.

‘You wanted to see town?’ she asks, and makes short work of folding the blanket and handing it back to him.

He takes it, and stares at her.

‘Uh – yes, yes, of course, um – if you are still willing?’

‘I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t,’ she assures him with a very warm hand on his arm.

Mounted and secure, she leads him out of the clearing and into town.

‘There are stables, at the gates,’ she explains, ‘you don’t have to pay to leave your horse there, but they like it if you clean up after yourself.’

‘Of course.’

Clint has never cleaned up after a horse, and she sees it on his face; he catches the smile she directs to the path ahead.

‘Don’t laugh at me.’

‘I didn’t say a word.’

‘But you thought it.’

‘My lips are sealed, good sir. I shan’t have you slandering my name.’

‘I don’t know your name.’

‘As it should be.’

She kicks her heels and moves a horse length ahead of him, leaving him pouting at the back of her head.

They must look a sight when they arrive at the gates, her with her skewbald cob and her faded dress, him in his favourite brocade coat and palomino. But nobody bats an eye, and the man on the gates just waves them hello without looking twice.

‘My horse will be safe?’ he asks, as they dismount.

He’s not foolish enough to not know that the palomino is the most expensive horse in the row, though he does see a plain thoroughbred further on down, so he isn’t the only rich man.

‘Put him in with mine,’ she says, ‘he’s a gentle thing, but he’ll bite anyone that tries to free him.’

Clint eyeballs the horse, but the stable has plenty of space for them both, so he pats the steed’s nose, and the girl latches them in.

‘Welcome to town,’ she says, hands sweeping across the scene before them, and Clint has the urge to take her arm.

He doesn’t have time to think about it before she’s grabbing his hand and dragging him into the crowds around the stalls of the market, and Clint hasn’t been around so many people for – a long time. They smell like people, soap and sweat and iron, and he doesn’t stick out as much as he might have thought he would, but he’s clearly not of the townsfolk. They pass a fabric stall, and she pauses, briefly, to look at the material on display.

‘Back again?’ the haberdasher laughs, and the girl blushes.

‘I can’t resist looking every time,’ she says, wistful.

The haberdasher’s eyes flick to Clint, looking a little lost, but attentive.

‘Brought your man with you this time, I see,’ she says.

They both open their mouths, but fumble over sounds trying to find something to say. The haberdasher laughs, and tells Clint that it’s the purple silk that she likes most.

‘Every time she sees it,’ she says, ‘she can’t resist it.’

‘I see,’ Clint says, and looks at the girl’s head, sees the redness in her ears. ‘I’ll bear it in mind, thank you.’

The girl tugs him away, and Clint tosses a glance over his shoulder, just to get the colour of the silk in his head.

‘She’s horrible,’ she tells him.

‘She’s nice, take that back.’

They float around town for a little longer; the girl has some genuine errands to run, and gets genuinely offended when Clint offers to pay for the goods she purchases, but he smoothes it over, and she leads him to what looks like a hole in the wall.

‘This is my Angie,’ she says, and leans into the hole. ‘Angie! Don’t tell me you got swallowed up by the oven!’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ comes a call back, and a pretty blonde woman covered in flour appears in the window. ‘And how’s my favourite customer?’

The girl pouts. Clint finds himself pouting that the several people they’ve spoken to have not once used the girl’s name.

‘Full,’ she admits, with a sigh. ‘He surprised me with a picnic. Very inconsiderate, considering I was coming to you for my daily dose of extra cheese.’

‘The most inconsiderate,’ Angie agrees. ‘Well, then, sir, madam, what might I tempt you with today?’

The girl runs over the concept with him; a flatbread with tomato paste and cheese, with a range of options from vegetables to cooked meats to absolutely nothing, if you were boring.

Her words, and she gives him a challenging look, as if to dare him.

‘I’ll take one with everything,’ he says, and glances at her, ‘and for the lady?’

She says she’d like her regular, and Angie gives Clint a beaming grin before disappearing back into the hole to make the order up. When the girl reaches for her purse, Clint grabs her wrist.

‘Let me,’ he says, ‘please.’

She tries to stare him down, but he can stare down Lucky, and eventually her hand softens, and he lets go, pulling the right coins out.

‘Here we are!’ Angie hums, appearing once again in the hole, two slabs of bread on a tray. ‘A regular and an everything, as ordered!’

Clint hands over the coins, tells her keep the change, knowing full well he’s paid her probably more than she’s earned all day, and turns his attention to the flatbread.

‘Well, that’s certainly an everything,’ he says.

‘You did ask,’ the girl laughs, and takes a bite from hers, with peppers and chicken and lots of cheese. ‘Angie, you do God’s work, you know that?’

‘It’s rude to talk with your mouth full,’ Angie snorts, waving her hand at them, ‘go on, get outta here, I don’t want riff-raff clogging up my hole in the wall.’

Laughing with a hand over her mouth, the girl gestures with her head, and leads Clint to the fountain in the centre of the town, where children are playing, and a loose lamb is bounding about the place, as, so she tells him, it’s wont to do.

‘He’s a rebel,’ she says, and tucks her legs under her to sit on the fountain’s wall, her skirt spreading beautifully across her knees. ‘It’d be nice, to be able to be that free.’

Clint, mouth full of bread and cheese and a very hot pepper, cannot comment, but he nods.

Freedom would be nice, he thinks. But it isn’t a luxury offered to him; when he returns to the palace later, he will have two earfuls from the Regent, and more earfuls from the rest, and he’ll be under lock and key for days. He wonders if he should go back at all, or if he should find lodgings in town, take up a pseudonym, pretend to be someone else. He saw a woodworking shop on the edge of the market, he could put his carpentry skills to use, earn a living, make an honest man out of himself. 

 Out of this lovely creature next to him, watching the world passing them by and stuffing her face full of cheese.

Yes, he thinks, watching her profile and pretending like his nose isn’t running from the heat of the peppers. Yes, this is the woman he thinks he might marry, if he has such a say as to have one at all. This woman, with her golden eyes and messy hair, who talked to him like an equal, who ate with her hands and looked at silk like it was a luxury she would never have, that’s the one for him.

‘I never asked you,’ she starts, ‘what you do.’

Clint pauses for a moment.

‘I – I’m an apprentice,’ he says, because he doesn’t want to tell her. If she knows he is a Prince, she will change. She will no longer be this open and wonderful delight, but some subservient yes-woman, and he doesn’t want that.

And it’s not a lie, not really.

He is an apprentice, it’s just a bit more extensive than carpentry.

‘Oh? What are you apprenticed in that you can ride a palomino so freely?’

‘Politics, I’m afraid.’

He expects her to spit on the ground; most – he hates thinking it – but most commoners tend to do that sort of thing.

Instead, she smiles. There’s tomato sauce on her lip.

‘Oh, I adore the Regent!’ she exclaims, ‘he’s ever so kind, and he’s been so very good for the kingdom. I was too young to remember when the King died, but I heard some things about the way the kingdom was run, and he’s done some wonderful things for the trades! And I hear the Prince is shaping up to be a much better King than his father was.’

 ‘Oh?’ he asks, ‘I’ve heard the opposite.’

‘You would, in politics. I hear a lot of things in politics that I know aren’t true from talking to actual people and not old men.’

He must look bemused, because she blushes then.

‘Where I – work. There are lots of political discussions. But when I come into town, when I talk to people like Angie, I see a different side to it. They all say it’s terrible, that the Kingdom is dying, that the Prince will lead us back into war, but I don’t see that. There are problems, of course there are! But I see the good, I see people who want a – they want a father, if that makes sense. We don’t want some iron fist working us to the bone. We want a father who’ll listen to our troubles, who’ll work with us, instead of against us. The King, from what I understand, the poor were very poor, and the rich were very rich. But now the poor can _get_ rich, and the rich have to work to stay rich, and that’s how it should be.’

Clint finds himself with half-chewed food in his mouth, just watching her.

He wants to ask her to marry him right there and then. If she thinks he must be the father of the kingdom, of his men, treat them all as his children and love them so very dearly, then she must surely be their mother. He will never understand people the way she does, but if she was at his side, he wouldn’t _need_ to.

However.

She’s a servant, and servants do not marry Princes.

‘I agree,’ he says, because he needs to say something that isn’t getting on one knee. ‘Absolutely, I agree. There were a lot of policies in place that were a detriment to the people, and I would love to see the kingdom in safe hands once the Regent steps down.’

She nods, and finishes off her flatbread.

Clint watches her for a moment more, and then shovels the last of the bread in his mouth too.

* * *

 

He wants to ride with her the entire way home, but she stops him halfway along the path, pulling her cob to a stop and looking anywhere but at him.

‘This has been – you’re _lovely_ , sir,’ she says, ‘you are, truly. But, I – I am not a fool. You are a gentleman, and obviously one of good repute.’ She gestures at him, at his horse and coat and shining boots, dulled only by the day’s wear. ‘And I am very much not a lady. My skirt is patched and my shoes old. We are – if you are not already married, you soon will be, and I don’t want to be – ‘

‘I’m not married,’ he interrupts. ‘And I don’t very much wish to marry someone I do not love.’

He tries to emphasise his words, tries to look at her in the way he feels Natasha looks at Sam when she can’t spit the words out but wants him to hear them. She falls silent, lips parted, and he finds himself licking his own, wants desperately to kiss her. But she’s right; he is a gentleman, and gentleman don’t grab girls by the collar to kiss them silly. He’d fall out of his saddle anyway, and that’s not very dignified.

Her eyes flicker to his lips, and then she licks hers, and swallows thickly.

‘Um. I – you’re not married?’

‘No, ma’am. And I don’t wish to yet.’

She covers her mouth, fights for something to say, but can’t seem to find anything.

‘Oh,’ she says in the end. ‘I see. Well, my point stands. We are not of the same class, sir. I have no doubt that your beneficiary will find you a suitable bride, and – and that she will not be me. So it has been lovely, the loveliest day of my life, but I’m afraid this will be where we part.’

 She looks like she’s about to cry, and Clint can’t –

He can’t do it.

He snatches the reins out of her hands to guide the horses closer, and then freezes, surprised at himself. She looks at the red marks on her fingers where the reins had been yanked free, and then at his hand, clutching them so tightly his knuckles are white.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

‘I want to see you again,’ he says, ‘I don’t _care_ that you’re a servant, or a maid, or of a different class. I don’t give a damn. Politics isn’t all I can do, I’d leave it behind in a heartbeat, I would.’

She still looks like she’s about to cry.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Please, tell me your name.’

She opens her mouth, and her breath catches, like she’s about to say something, when a called ‘hullo!’ from further down the path makes them both jerk. They’d been almost nose to nose, so unaware of the world around them, and Clint feels dizzy pulling out of her space, out of the warmth of her eyes and the smell of her skin.

A man, on a black horse, plodding towards them. Clint doesn’t recognise him, even though he wears a white sash across one shoulder, and a white epaulet on the other over a black jerkin. Lean, and tall, with cheekbones sharper than Clint’s ever seen, and skin like he works outdoors. Clint’s not a pale man, but there is a weather-beaten warmth to the stranger’s skin that makes him feel a little bit inferior.

‘Is he bothering you, miss?’ the stranger asks, and Clint tries not to feel smug at how his – his friend – leans towards him.

‘No, sir, we’re fine, thank you.’

The man reins his horse in, and looks intimidating in the sun, in all black with just the white details. It’s wrong, something is very wrong about it. Clint has only his sword and his bow, and a knife in his boot because he’s not stupid. But something tells him that might not be enough.

‘Are you quite sure? I don’t mind scaring him off, if you’d like. These rich boys, they all think they are owed deference.’

Her nose wrinkles, minutely. ‘I’m quite sure, sir, thank you very much. We were just saying goodbye.’

At this, she turns to Clint, puts her hand on his for a lingering moment, before taking her reins back.

‘It was a lovely day, thank you.’

She gives the stranger a wide berth, and Clint can tell from the set of her shoulders that she’s forcing herself not to look back. And with good reason; the stranger turns in his saddle to watch her go, and doesn’t turn back until she’s rounded the corner of the path and the sound of her horse is gone from the air.

‘You should watch yourself, Prince,’ the stranger says then, turning back and cocking his head. ‘Out here all alone? It is _very_ dangerous.’

Clint laughs. ‘Are you threatening me? Do you think I would be out here alone without knowing how to defend myself?’

‘Stay away from her, hey? It won’t do you any good.’

The stranger kicks his heels, and the horse walks on, slowly, as though it knows its owner wants to go as slowly as possible. They pass by Clint, and his palomino shifts uncomfortably, and the two men stare at each other.

Clint doesn’t turn back to watch him once he’s passed his shoulder, and instead waits until he’s sure he’s alone before leading his horse off the path and into the woods, cutting through to get back to the palace as quickly as possible.

Bucky is waiting for him by the gate, looking unimpressed, but unsurprised.

‘The girl?’ he asks, as Clint dismounts, the horse still walking. ‘Show off.’

Clint stomps over to grab his arm, and Bucky stares at him.

‘What is it?’

‘Well, she’s the one. I just have to work out how I'm – whatever, there was a man in the woods. He – there was something wrong about him, Buck. I don’t know who he was, but I don’t like it.’

Bucky spreads his hands. ‘There’s a lot of wrong men in this kingdom, Clint. I need more to go on than you don’t like him. We don’t like Pierce either.’

‘Well, Pierce is an insufferable idiot. He was – um – black horse, black jerkin, military, a – a white sash, and one epaulet. Just one. Fucking weird.’

Bucky frowns at him. ‘ _One_.’

Clint nods. ‘Exactly. I don’t like it one bit. He threatened me, it was – I’m not bothered that he knew who I was, most people do. But to threaten me.’

‘Death sentence,’ Bucky shrugs.

‘Not legally.’

Bucky gives him a look that clearly reads; it will be if I catch him.

Clint gives him a look back that says; don’t be a twat.

‘I’ll tell Sam,’ Bucky says, ‘and we’ll go out in the morning, just the two of us, see if we can find anything. With a look like that, somebody will have seen something.’

‘Just don’t go causing a ruckus,’ Clint says, ‘I don’t know who he is, but I don’t want an incident.’

Heaving a sigh, because for someone who wants a quiet life, he loves a good ruckus, Bucky turns, and gestures, and they walk back to the palace, and talk of other things.

* * *

 

Laura takes a longer route home than normal, taking some detours and winding paths, just in case the stranger chooses to follow her, but she sees or hears nothing, and breathes easy once she’s got the horse stabled, and she’s back in her attic looking at the palace, shining in the sunlight.

‘He wants to see me again,’ she tells it, though it cannot answer, being a building some many miles away.

It stands there, immobile and shining, and she leans her elbows on the sill, her chin in her hands.

‘He wants to see me again, even though he knows I am not a noble. He called me _lovely_ , and he said he’d give up the apprenticeship if he had to, just to see me again! I don’t know how it could work, how I could see him again. I’d like to – but – ‘

Here, she sighs, and turns her gaze to the birds in the skies.

‘You don’t have this problem,’ she says, and then pulls away from the window and to the loose floorboard under her bed, where a box hides.

In the box is a pretty little brooch, that belonged to her mother. It’s two golden birds, sitting on a branch with ruby and sapphire flowers, diamonds on their wings. She vaguely recalls a story about it dating to her parents’ wedding, but the story of how it came to be in their possession is hazy at best. A gift of some sort. She supposes she’ll never know the answer now. But it’s a physical memory of her mother, and it’s the only one she has. There are no paintings, no diaries, no letters. No memories of her lullabies, or her fingers, or her arms. Just this brooch.

‘Momma,’ she says, tilting it into the light so the jewels sparkle. ‘I wonder what you’d think of him. He’s lovely, and he’d give up everything for me. I don’t think Papa would approve, but I – there is something about him. Something I can’t name. Did you feel it for Papa, when you met? Something in your belly telling you it was right, that it was meant to be? He looked at me with such honesty, such openness. I do not think he is playing a trick.’

She laughs at herself then; talking to a brooch as though she’s talking to her mother! The loneliness has driven her mad, obviously.

‘I suppose I must make my own decision,’ she tells the birds, and puts them back in the box.

The Baron had ignored her when she returned, caught up in paperwork, and she’d taken it for the grace it was. She won’t go back downstairs until she’s called, or the morning, whichever comes first.

Which is perfectly fine by her, she has plenty to daydream about. The warmth of her –

‘Ha,’ she says, and throws herself onto her bed, staring at the cobwebs on the ceiling, there because she can’t reach them. ‘I don’t know his name either. Suppose I did run away. I’d never be able to find him. He’s apprenticed to a politician, but that could be anybody.’

She considers it some more.

‘He might be available at the palace, if he is apprenticed to someone on the council. Or someone might know who he is, at least. If I had to, I could always ask, how many beautiful men are there with sticking-out ears and a palomino?’

His ears were adorable, and his hair a mess because he’d clearly been trying to straighten it out before she arrived, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d made it worse. He was beautiful, in a way she’d never thought a man could be beautiful, and she wonders if he wakes up that beautiful, or if he has to work at it in front of a mirror.

She sighs, and hums to herself as she lies there staring at the sky through the window. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was more of a plan than nothing.

‘That coat, though! Who let him out in _purple_ of all colours!’

It was a lovely coat, to be sure. A nice deep purple, one that suited him very well indeed, but it was purple, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen a man wear purple before.

One of the local hawks lands on the open sill and looks at her. She has nothing to offer it, but she tells it about the man anyway, and it looks at her.

‘I always thought purple was the royal house’s colour,’ she says, and the hawk squawks at her before flapping off. ‘Perhaps he is apprenticed to one of the Council, and he knows the Prince. They’d be about the same age, I think. He’d said something about safe hands though, when the Regent steps down. I wonder what he thinks of the Prince, then. I do hope he’s not _bad_.’

She feels almost guilty, now, for having an opinion on the royal house, on the politics of the kingdom, when she had no real knowledge of how it worked, and the poor man had agreed with her. But then, he’d have stopped her, if he’d had a problem with what she’d said, and so she resolves to not feel guilty about. They were full-grown, of age, they could talk like civilised people and she was as entitled to her opinion as anybody on the street.

‘He needs better company, if he’s hearing bad things about the Regent, though.’

It’s the last she says of the matter, choosing instead to do some minor crafting; patching holes in one of her dresses, darning some socks, the usual sort.

 She sings all the while, and for a time, the birds outside sing back to her.

* * *

 

Clint kicks Natasha’s door open, and she rolls her eyes to the ceiling.

‘You can personally repaint that.’

‘Shut up. A ball.’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to me. A ball. Inviting _every_ eligible maiden in the kingdom. _Every_. Maiden.’

Natasha gives him a cool look. ‘I do in fact understand you when you speak, Clint. Even when the words sound more like “oink, oink” than actual words.’

He pulls a face. ‘Are you listening?’

She puts the last pin in her hair and gets to her feet. ‘Yes, I heard you, and I’ve already proposed the idea to the Regent.’

This stops him.

‘You have?’

‘I told you, give me a day or two and I’d think of something. And think of something I did. It’s the only comfortable way to get the girl to the ball, after all. And it gives us all a little bit of breathing room from this marriage debacle. Well – except for you. You’ll have an entire evening of introductions and you’ll have to dance with them, but I should imagine plenty of eligible fellows will also attend, and that should thin them out a little bit.’

Clint gapes at her.

‘I hate you,’ he says, because he adores the very bones of her, but she can’t give him this one thing.

‘You _love_ me,’ she snorts. ‘It has been agreed, by the way. That there will be a ball. It will be in a month, because these things take time to organise, but it _will_ happen.’

She watches him pace about her room for a minute, and when he pauses at her balcony doors, staring outside with his hands behind his back, she asks if he had a good day.

‘Phil knows where you went. I don’t know how he found out, but he knows.’

‘I don’t care,’ Clint says, and launches into an explanation of the day that has Natasha wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- madam fry is the proprietor of the griffith hotel in agent carter  
> \- my girl angieeeeeeeee inventing modern pizza like a lifetime early, what a trendsetter  
> \- its amazing the things you learn, like i wanted clint to have pepperoni but alas, it wasn't around until the 1920s, while pizza in general was around in the 1800s  
> \- the apprentice conversation is a nod to kit and ella's conversation in 2015's cinderella. how i wish there was a gus gus to accompany laura in her travels  
> \- say hello to a villain, points if you can identify him  
> \- i like to imagine nat talking with a super thick russian accent all the time even though she can absolutely phase it out, just because i think its great  
> \- you know what else is also great? comments, i love comments, feed my fragile ego lmao  
> \- see yall next time!!!!


	4. Preparing for Nothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ball approaches, and Laura's dress is very nice indeed.
> 
> Now introducing: plot. Warning: the Baron once again.
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies!!!

Being the Regent's aide as he is, and the Prince's chief advisor in the lead up to his coronation, Phil finds his days pleasantly busy. He's back and forth much of the time, and there have been times where Clint's behaviour gives him such an awful pain in his chest, but there's a sort of routine to even his most erratic of moods.

Clint has a temper, and he does his best to control it, but he hates being cooped up and told what to do when it isn't something he finds productive. He'll be a good ruler, if he marries the right woman, and calms some of his impetuous childishness. Nick has spoken, quite fondly, of the Harcourt girl, and there is a small part of Phil Coulson, as he sips at his coffee and looks at the latest list of to-dos, that hopes Clint's mystery girl is the Harcourt heir.

It's hard to tell; he'd missed them in town, if that's where they had gone, having been otherwise engaged at the Baron's house. He'd noticed her absence, of course, and wasn't surprised; the last time he'd visited, the Baron had locked the girl in her bedroom until he'd gone. Phil had enquired about it, as a matter of interest, but the Baron had said something to the effect of not wanting to disrupt the girl’s mind. She remembered little to nothing of her childhood, and, so he claimed, remembered very little of arriving at the Baron’s house. She remembered her father, and knew that he had died when she was young, but not how or why or when.

Trauma, so the Baron had shrugged, stirring a sugar lump into his tea. It does funny things to even the best of men, so what hope did a little girl have?

Phil had not wanted to leave without seeing the girl for himself, but was not left out of the Baron’s sight to investigate, and so as he had walked back to his horse, he had looked up at the house and seen a little face peering at him from out of the attic window. He’d waved, and the face disappeared. He suspected, not looking back again, that it reappeared a few moments later, the same way Clint, having been a child at the time, would peer around corners and over books, just enough to see his eyes, wide and blue and too observant. The boy watched too much, and as much as Phil loved the intelligence that often didn’t get to the forefront of the Prince’s persona, not knowing what he was thinking, what he was paying attention to, it was a minor frustration.

But yes. The girl wasn’t to be seen again, and so he couldn’t say one way or the other what her relationship, if any, was to the Prince.

If she heard the announcement, as well she should, she would be there at the ball, and they would find her. If she was of suitable birth, Phil does not see a reason for the Regent to oppose their marriage. The council will object, because the council always objects, and both Phil and the Regent suspect there is something more to their objections than mere petulance. But, as with most things, they cannot prove it one way or the other.

He’d been to see the Regent first thing this morning, to discuss their options further.

‘I don’t like that she isn’t in her house,’ the Regent had said, and Phil, looking over Nick’s paperwork, had nodded.

‘I know,’ he’d replied, because it bothered him as well. ‘But we only have the Baron’s word that she doesn’t remember her childhood. I have no doubt from seeing her in town that she would have fought to return home by now, if she knew.’

Nick had rubbed at his temple, where he bears the scar of that night, only half-hidden behind the patch. The glass eye beneath it was sore. It usually was.

‘We’d have to deal with that fool of a boy first,’ he’d said, and Phil had nodded.

They both knew without Laura there to argue her case, without her knowledge and permission, that there was little to nothing they could do to remove Zemo from the house. Announcing her presence in the Baron’s house was just as dangerous as leaving her in ignorance, and they had hoped, as she grew, that she might remember, might ask questions.

‘Perhaps it is time to bring her to the palace,’ Nick had said after a minute’s silence.

‘Perhaps. From what my men and I have seen of her, she seems a pleasant girl, very accepting and understanding. I am sure she’d be receptive to a discussion of her childhood.’

And so it had been decided, without deciding much at all; Phil would work on getting Laura to the ball. By hook or by crook, so the Regent had said, but Phil doesn’t think they’ll need to involve scoundrels. The Prince is a scoundrel enough for their purposes.

A knock at his door, soft but confident.

‘It’s open, Natasha.’

She gives him a look when she swishes in, looking lovely in a deep red. It’s a little more modest than her usual fare, and he wonders what her Captain has done to her this time. After shutting the door and gathering her skirts to sit nicely in the armed chair on the other side of his desk, she settles herself in to wait.

This is why he likes Natasha; she is bold as brass, and utterly unashamed of anything she does, but she is polite, and she maintains her manners in the most dignified way possible when telling someone to fuck off.

He finishes his reading, and his coffee, and then she says, ‘there is a purple silk on the market in town that Clint’s mystery girl favours. She is also fond of the woman that cooks flatbreads.’

Phil nods. ‘Thank you, Natasha.’

He knows, from his men’s reports, that Laura is also fond of purple silk and the flatbreads. It bodes well.

‘He won’t tell me what she looks like, however. Just that she is lovely,’ Natasha admits, and wrinkles her nose. ‘He has never kept a secret from me before.’

‘He’s entitled to this one, I think,’ Phil tells her. ‘If the Council have their way, he will never see his mystery girl again, and he’ll marry a Princess within a fortnight of the ball.’

‘I think it’s folly,’ she announces, because Natasha is a creature of opinion. ‘Marrying outside of your borders is for political alliance, not strength. We don’t need political alliance, we have everything we need inside the kingdom.’

Phil notices the inclusive pronoun, and smiles.

‘I agree,’ he says, because he does. ‘You know I think the Council are wrong, and you know I have done what I can to interfere with their schemes. But I want Clint on the throne as soon as I can get him there.’

He feels like they’ve had this conversation before. He feels like they’ve all had this conversation, in some fashion, before.

‘If I learn anything more of note, I’ll be sure to let you know.’

‘What dress are you planning on wearing to the ball?’

‘The most hideous one I can have made,’ Natasha says, ‘and even more hideous than that, if I can manage it. I don’t want to marry him. And I should think if the silly little socialites think I am an example to follow, I can persuade him to not marry them, either.’

Natasha has been considered a source of fashion ideals since her arrival, and Phil has seen the effect she’s had on the upper echelons. It’s almost comical, how they clamour to follow Natasha’s lead, when most of what she wears is what Clint despises, because she thinks it’s funny to make him upset about ruffles at least once a week.

‘He hates ruffles.’

‘Yes,’ Natasha says, ‘and bows. He’s fond of embroidery right now, if his coats are anything to go by. He had a new one in Tyrian just commissioned, it’s ever so pretty, for something he thinks is good.’

Phil laughs without really laughing, and admits he had noticed Clint’s tendency towards understatement lately.

‘I chalked it up to his maturing.’

Natasha gives him another look. She’s very good at those.

‘Yes, yes, I know. He’s an open bottle of wine when it comes to maturing.’

They chat a little longer, about other things – Sam and the cat and the ongoing concern that is Steve’s health – and then Natasha takes her leave at the sound of barking down the hall.

‘He will be on his way to beg help with his dress coat,’ she tells him, and Phil nods.

‘Undoubtedly. The Regent will have told him to dress appropriately.’

With half a smile, Natasha bows her head and swishes from the room. Not long after, Clint comes crashing in, looking rumpled and like he hasn’t had a wink of sleep. Phil puts his to-do list to one side; the Prince comes first. The Harcourt girl will still be there when he gets to her. 

* * *

Laura misses the first announcement for the ball, but the twins are lying in wait for her when she goes to town the next day, and she asks about the peculiar atmosphere in the streets as they drag her through to the town square.

‘You'll see,’ Pietro assures her, ‘just wait.’

The town crier has been scheduled to come every day for a week, to make sure everybody is aware, and Laura stands there gaping as he proclaims that in honour of the Prince's birthday (long since passed, they all know his birthday is at the beginning of the year) the royal palace will hold a ball, to which every eligible maiden is invited. It will be held in a month, and eligible gentlemen are also invited, naturally. For a moment, Laura considers what she is hearing. Wanda is holding her arm, waiting for it to sink in.

‘They're inviting everyone!’ Wanda tells her, when the silence has gone on too long. ‘That's you, as well!’

‘I don't need to go to a ball to impress the Prince,’ Laura says with a laugh, ‘you know it's a last effort to marry him off.’

Wanda nods. ‘Yes, but your man might be there. He said he wasn't married, didn't he? That means he's eligible, and he'll be there anyway, if he's a politician.’

Laura had, in fact, considered this, but it seems so - silly. To go to a ball just to find that nice apprentice man, even though not two nights ago, she'd laid in bed and resolved to ask the palace if they knew who he was.

‘I couldn't go,’ she says. ‘The Baron would never allow it. And besides, I have no dress.’

Pietro makes a face. ‘He can't oppose royal proclamation,’ he says. ‘He'll have to allow you to go.’

‘It doesn't resolve the issue of my not having a nice dress, Piet. I own three dresses, and all three have patches. I doubt even the palace's poorest servants have patches on their dresses.’

Pietro continues to pull a face, but the one Wanda pulls at him makes him stop.

‘Well, we just won't go together, then,’ she says, with a squeeze of Laura's arm, and Laura smiles.

‘Are you not eligible?’ she asks.

‘No,’ she says, and sounds proud of it. ‘Not as of yesterday.’

Pietro seems surprised by this.

‘What do you mean?’

‘My scholarly friend met me after the announcement, while you were playing the fool with that girl at the fruit stall.’

‘And does your scholarly friend have a name?’ Laura asks, because Pietro is about to go into a frothing rage at having missed an opportunity to embarrass his sister.

‘Victor,’ Wanda says, with the kind of sigh that Laura thinks is how all romantic heroines sound.

It's unlike her, usually so serious and thoughtful and full of logic, that Laura wonders if she really feels so besotted by this fellow, or if she's playing up to the expectation. But there is something soft in her face, something delightfully young and hopeful, and Laura loves it.

‘I hope I get to meet him before the wedding,’ she teases, ‘or it'll be an awkward conversation!’

‘Oh yes,’ Wanda assures her, ‘he said that he was very eager to meet you, and has left it up to me to find time for you to meet. Men!’

Laura laughs, and lets Wanda drag her away from the town crier, into the throng of people. She listens to her, of course, listens to her friend talk of Victor’s height and his ever so delightfully posh accent, and his gentle manner, as though afraid that everything he looked at and touched might fall to pieces around him, the way he held his posture even when there was nobody to judge him. Of course she listened, but her mind was circling around the possibilities that had been presented to her by the announcement.

Supposing she _could_ go to the ball – and Pietro was right, the royal seal hollered over any excuse the Baron might make, because it was a crime to disobey an order from the Regent – supposing she managed to get a nice dress, and managed to get to the palace and was allowed entrance. Suppose that was so.

How would she find her apprentice? There would be rich and poor alike, nobles and commoners wall-to-wall, and she would have trouble, she thinks, distinguishing some of the former from the latter. She’d have to maybe ask the guards if they knew any politicians around the Prince’s age, but they would ask questions, and what does she say then? Perhaps her apprentice would be looking for her, too, and they would meet somewhere in the middle. The inclusion of eligible gentlemen makes Laura think that they intend to thin the herd of ladies out, so that the Prince has fewer choices, and, she thinks, to get rid of most of the common girls. They wouldn’t have dowries fit for a Prince, but they would do just fine for a local lad.

She had a month to think on it, or a week or so at the least, and think of a way to convince the Baron that she intended no mischief by going, and so she would think of it later.

Wanda leads her into the little secluded corner where they always have tea, and take their seats. Laura, still considering her options, and Wanda, still gushing praise of her Victor – _her_ Victor! How sweet and wonderful that was! – leaves Pietro to order their drinks, and the emphasis he puts on the nettle tea he orders his sister snaps both girls from their own worlds, and Wanda turns her attentions to protests against her evil little twin, and Laura takes over correcting the orders. As she watches the girl walk away, stifling her laughter behind her fingers, she sees a man sitting a table or two over, watching her with something she doesn’t like.

He’s well-dressed, if understated, with smart hair and lines just coming into his mouth and eyes. They lock gazes for a second, and Laura doesn’t know whether to stare him down or hide her face, and so freezes, prey before predator. Then he tips his head, and looks back to the book in his hand. Her heart racing, she nudges Pietro’s foot with hers.

‘Do you know him?’ she whispers, barely moving her lips, and Pietro eyes her for a moment before sliding his gaze past her.

‘Seen him around,’ he murmurs back, leaning forward to make a fuss of the cruet set on the table. ‘Don’t know him. I’ll keep my eyes open.’

Pietro is loud, and boisterous, and full of trouble, but he’s a good boy, under all his bluster and bad hair. Feeling soothed by his immediate acknowledgement of the man, Laura puts it to the back of her mind.

 After they’ve had tea, and teased Wanda some more, they head back to the stables so that Laura can finish up her chores and return to the house. It’s only as she turns to say goodbye to them that she notices the man from the next table over is walking in their direction, doing his best to look as though he wasn’t watching or following them, even though his determined inconspicuousness does nothing but make it even more obvious.

‘I’d better go,’ she says, and Pietro does his best to not immediately turn around.

‘Stay safe,’ Wanda whispers in her ear as she leans down to kiss her cheek.

She leads her horse out of the stables and waits until the gates have disappeared around the corner before she kicks him into a gallop.

* * *

 

Sam and Bucky spend all morning investigating the woods and the villages for any trace of the peculiarly-dressed man that Clint had mentioned. They try to be subtle, but people are cagey and look at them askance. For a while, Sam blames Bucky’s terrible hair and wet-housecat expression, but eventually they resort to reminding everybody and anybody that threatened regicide is in fact something you can be arrested for, and covering for anybody talking about such a terrible crime is also something you could see a dungeon for.

They’d gotten no more answers than they had being nice about it, but people’s cagey answers had become spaced much further apart, and a few whispered words and half-hidden pointed fingers led them to an old estate.

A duchy, so they were told, belonging to an old family. The mother died in childbirth, the father died a decade or so ago, and the sole daughter had disappeared. It left her step-mother and the man that had become something of a step-father in the interim of her disappearance in limbo. They couldn’t claim the duchy on account of the daughter being missing and not officially dead, but they had to keep the estate running in her absence.

They also didn’t answer the door.

Bucky, sat astride his horse with an increasingly sullen expression on his face, tapped at the pommel of his saddle and clicked his tongue.

‘I’m going to knock the fuckin’ gate down,’ he says, and Sam, off his horse and padding around in the undergrowth next to the garden wall, doing his job, tells him to pack it in.

‘Your horse isn’t big enough,’ he says, waving a hand vaguely behind him. ‘Look at this.’

After a moment’s flat staring at the gates, Bucky dismounts and goes to see what Sam is looking at.

‘It’s fresh dirt,’ he says, ‘a rabbit or a badger or some shit.’

Sam sighs like he wants to say something a lot ruder than anything Bucky could think of.

‘It’s what’s in the dirt,’ he says, with a break because he wants to say something even ruder still.

Bucky squats to take a better look, and then groans.

‘I fucking hate traitors,’ he says.

Sitting in the dirt, half-uncovered by some burrowing critter, is a white epaulet and sash, and a rather large knife.

‘I hate reporting to the Regent more,’ he adds.

‘What would you rather do?’ Sam asks, and shrugs out of his coat to wrap the items up. They don’t prove much more than what they can infer, and that’s not a whole lot, but it’s more evidence than none at all. ‘Talk to the Regent, or do the round up of old palace guards for the ball.’

Bucky considers this for a moment. ‘I don’t know which is worse, so I’ll take the Regent.’

As he goes back to his horse, he’s pretty sure he hears Sam call him a coward, but Bucky knows that common sense does not make him a coward, and he’s done many reckless things in his life. Trying to convince that lunatic to come back to the palace for the noisiest, brightest, most intense night of bedlam is peak foolishness.

Sam can talk to him, and speak to the girl too. Everybody knows he won’t go anywhere she isn’t these days, because word gets around about how she once stabbed a man seven times.

The weight of the treasonous items weighs heavily on them on the ride back to the palace, and Clint, clearly winding the guards up by playing with his dog, gives them a look as they walk past. They don’t acknowledge him beyond the compulsory nod, and that tells him everything he needs to know. He won’t be leaving the palace alone any time soon, and that means any attempt to see his Lady Love, the mother of his kingdom, his wife-to-be-if-he-gets-any-say, they’ll all be stopped.

* * *

 

The haberdasher is happy to sell him several metres of the purple silk, and asks him who it’s for.

‘I can’t imagine the Prince would want a suit of this,’ she says.

Phil smiles at her, and she takes a second before smiling back.

‘I hope the Prince likes the dress,’ she says.

‘I hope he likes the girl in it,’ Phil replies, because dresses are just decoration, at the end of the day.

Tucking the fabric under his arm, wrapped up nicely in cheap muslin to keep it safe, Phil thanks her again, and heads back to his carriage.

* * *

 

Later that evening, as the twins walk home from their latest mischief, arm-in-arm and debating what exactly they have in the pantry to make for dinner, Pietro stops.

Wanda staggers to a halt when his arm tugs hers, and she looks back at him, hand moving to hold his.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘We should make Laura a dress,’ he says, ‘she won’t be able to make one herself, you know the old fool will have her working to the bone to stop her. And if she doesn’t have a dress, he can use that as an excuse to not let her go.’

Wanda knows this, had thought of it yesterday, when she first heard the proclamation, and the decided tone to Pietro’s voice makes her think he’s been churning this over in his head since then, too.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘you’re quite right.’

‘I don’t know much about fashion,’ he admits.

‘I’ll go to the tailors in the morning,’ Wanda assures him, and tugs his hand to get him walking again. ‘And I’ll look at what the ladies are having made. All we need is some fabric, and I think I can make it look decent. It’s not hard to sew.’

Pietro hums, and makes a whole slew of noises that he probably thinks makes him sound like he’s doing a lot of thinking.

‘We can’t afford the silk she likes,’ he says, quiet.

‘I know. But she likes red too, and she looks good in red. We’ll make it look good, Piet. I promise you, she’ll be the belle of the ball.’

It takes a little more convincing, but Pietro agrees to get the red cotton and chiffon in the morning.

‘It’ll be a nice dress?’ he asks.

‘As nice as we can afford.’

The unspoken “and more” sits heavy in the air between them, but neither makes a move to deny it.

* * *

 

‘I wonder,’ says Nick, sitting on one of the benches in the garden, watching Clint practicing his archery with Bucky.

The boys are shoving each other good-naturedly; both have grass-stains on their bare elbows and knees, and Clint has a cut on his cheek from the snap of his bowstring, but he’d waved away the maid who’d tried to tell him to get it looked at. It’s a good day, with bright sunshine and warmth enough that the boys are engaged in that age-old tradition of twenty-something boys, getting their shirts off and their muscles flexed. The space where Nick’s eye had once been, where a glass eye now sits, aches terribly with the brightness of the sun, but he stays sat outside watching them bickering over who has the best arms.

It’s a tough call, so Natasha says, because obviously Captain Wilson has the best arms of all of them, but he isn’t in this little contest, so second is a tie, as far as she’s concerned.

‘Nobody asked your opinion!’ Clint hollers, and if he didn’t have company, Nick knows he’d have thrown his glass of water at her. He’d have missed, of course, because Clint has some manners, but he’s had his wrists slapped enough for one lifetime.

‘You wonder?’ Phil hums from beside him, his attention seemingly wholly on the notebooks in his lap. This is Phil’s way, of course, but Nick has seen his right hook, and it’s almost as mean as Bucky’s.

‘Yes. About the girl. Whether it was the right thing, to put her into hiding.’ Nick rubs his eyebrow, the closest he can get to the actual ache. ‘I didn’t want to leave her there,’ he says, and sighs. ‘I should have done what I intended to in the first place, and finished the journey.’

‘Sir,’ Phil says, finally looking up from the notebook. ‘You were bleeding to death, you had to leave her there or you’d have both been killed.’

Nick looks at him with that flat expression that has shaken overzealous merchants to their boots and back, but Phil meets it with pursed lips and creased brow.

‘She was safe there, and she’s still safe there now.’

‘I don’t trust him. Clint told me about the man in the woods. And what the Captains brought back from their search troubles me.’

‘The estate.’

Nick nods. ‘If you were trapped the way they are, in charge but with nothing in your name, and the only way to get the title was to either marry into the family or kill the last heir, what would you do?’

‘The son is close to her age,’ Phil says, and drums his pen on the notebook.

Across the garden, Clint and Bucky give up with archery and holler war cries. They’re boys, really, underneath their duties, and the way they wrestle is like boys, not well-trained soldiers.

 ‘I’d try and marry into the family, first,’ Phil continues, and sits back on the bench. ‘But I’d have to find her. But I’d have – I would – I hadn’t considered that.’

Nick sighs again. ‘There’s someone in the palace that knows too much, and they’ve given the information away, but I don’t know who.’

‘Well, it isn’t me,’ Phil says, ‘you know me better than that, sir.’

‘Of course not. And it isn’t any of the children, they haven’t got a brain cell between them.’

Bucky makes a noise like an angry cat; Clint has just bit his arm. Natasha is goading them. No brain cells, indeed.

They sit in silence for a moment. Nick waits for the realisation, like a penny in a glass of oil, and then Phil looks at him.

‘They’ve already tried marriage. That’s why Duke Harcourt – you never said.’

‘If she comes to the ball unprotected, they’re going to kill her.’

 Phil takes a deep breath. ‘I’ll find a suitable guard to take with me when I go to pick her up. I’m decent in a fight, but if they want her dead, I’m not going to be enough.’ He pauses, and then asks, ‘do you know who they hired?’

Nick shakes his head. ‘Not yet. I have some ideas, but it’s nothing certain.’

‘Does the Baron know, do you think? I spoke with him just the other day, and he didn’t let on to anything unusual, even by his standards.’

Nick doesn’t reply, which is enough of a reply that Phil nods to himself.

‘I understand. But why kill her? What does it do? They don’t have a daughter to replace her with, and marrying into the duchy doesn’t achieve anything. They’d get a seat on the Council, but one voice alone isn’t enough to – they’re planning to overthrow the throne. For the war?’

‘It cost everyone dearly,’ Nick says, as though it’s any sort of explanation.

Phil replays the conversation in his head, thinks for a moment on what he’s learnt, and to some degree, always known, and then asks, ‘why have they waited until now? If they knew where she was, if they knew the Baron had her, they could have had her killed when she was still a child.’

Nick doesn’t spread his hands, but sighs like he did. ‘Why do men do any of the things that they do? My best guess is that they wanted to bide their time, make it look unconnected to Duke Harcourt’s death, and now with the matter of Clint taking the crown, and the marriage, they’re running out of time.’

‘Do you want me to talk to her?’ Phil asks. ‘My evidence is suggesting she is Clint’s mystery girl, which will help matters.’

‘No, no. Not yet, not until I know who they’ve sent after her.’

Phil nods, and closes his notebook. ‘I had best go and speak to – ‘

‘Castle will be your best choice,’ Nick cuts him off. ‘The man is a savage, but he’ll die before he sees her hurt.’

Phil agrees, and takes his leave. Nick stays sitting on his bench for several further minutes, watching the boys finish up their tussling, and then he too takes his leave.

* * *

 

Pietro does not often sneak out at night, not any more. But he finds himself restless and uneasy for the first few nights after they decide to make Laura a dress. He’d bought red and white cotton, and the haberdasher had given him such a look, so he’d given her a look back, and he’s reluctant to go to that corner of the market now, because the looks hadn’t been very pleasant.

Wanda had looked at the tailors and come back with sketches and ideas and he thinks the dress will be very pretty indeed, and Laura will look wonderful in it, of course she will, but the dress will be very plain, and he doesn’t think he has the money to buy in all the bows and ribbons and such that will make it the prettiest dress of them all.

So he’s been restless, wondering what best to do, and now, he finds himself sneaking out, avoiding the creaking floorboard outside his sister’s door, and easing the door shut behind him. He feels bad, because he hasn’t stolen since he was a boy, and stealing ribbon is very different to stealing an apple, or a loaf of bread, but he wants the best for his friend, and that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to steal for, right?

Right.

Maybe.

And it’s not like it’s actually stealing, if the girls said he could have it. They’d been very kind about him wanting to make a nice dress for his friend, and he isn’t even offended that they’re giving him their rejected ribbons and beads and bows, the ones they don’t want or need any more, because they didn’t have to give him them at all. Wanda will be mad about it, because Wanda gets mad about these things, which is why he sneaks out.

 The girls all laugh and giggle and call him gentle names when he knocks on their windows, and tell him that they saw his friend in town last week with another man in a fancy coat, and he doesn’t stand a chance.

‘I know,’ he tells them, growing weary of it by the third time, ‘I’m doing this to help her meet him.’

One of the girls pulls him in by the collar for a very rude kiss that he very much enjoys, because that is the girl’s way, and leaves him with lipstick on his mouth that he smears on his hand trying to wipe away. Wanda will only complain when she sees it.

Ribbons and bows and beads obtained, he sneaks back in and leaves them on the table for Wanda to get her hair off about in the morning. It’s late, and he has an early morning start with the blacksmiths to go to.

* * *

 

The Baron takes the idea of Laura going to the ball about as well as she’d expected he would; with locked doors and yelling and refusal to allow her out of her attic. She takes to sitting in her window seat for the few days he keeps her cooped up, as though time to herself away from his constant demands, and privacy to think and write and not cut her knuckles on the washing board is punishment, and looks at the palace, glittering and shining in the sunlight.

It’s as pretty as ever, and looks further away than it ever has before, but Laura supposes it would, given that it’s been placed out of her reach.

‘What do you think, Mister Hawk?’ she asks one afternoon, to the hawk sitting on the windowsill and staring at her.

There’s a family of them, nesting in the nearby trees, and they’ve learnt that Laura will give them bits to build their nests, and she is gentle and quiet enough to elicit these kinds of quiet moments.

Mister Hawk doesn’t say anything, because he’s a hawk, and instead squawks at her before flapping back to his nest.

It’s about what she expected, if she’s honest.

The fight with the Baron hadn’t been much of a fight; Laura had hollered at the top of her lungs at the injustice of it, of how she didn’t want to go to the ball to meet the Prince, but instead to meet an apprentice she’d met, a young man who’d been very kind to her, and she wouldn’t even be gone that long. But the Baron had not cared for injustice, and had instead grown more and more agitated the more and more she’d railed against his judgement. She knows she isn’t meant to speak to strangers, and knows that meeting a man in the woods goes against what little common sense he’d given her, and she knows that she is meant to be hiding, even if she doesn’t understand what she is hiding from any longer. But what’s done is done, and she has met a way out, and she wants to take it.

Part of her wonders if the Baron does in fact care, and he’s just not very good at showing it. But the bruise on her wrist from him dragging her to the stairs tells her far more than any of his yelling about strangers ever would.

‘I’ll see him again,’ she tells the palace. ‘I don’t need you to do it. I’ll see him again, one way or another.’

* * *

 

 The Baron lets her back out in week two. She suspects, from the complaints from the milkman and more, that he’d gotten tired of dealing with the rabble, and had to let her back out to do the menial tasks.

‘I know,’ she says to the woodcutter, because she does know, no matter how placating her tone. ‘I understand, sir. But you’ve got me back now, and I’ll do my best to not be horrible.’

‘I don’t know why you don’t run away,’ the woodcutter says, putting the box of firestarters very nicely into her basket for her. ‘You know anybody in town’d have you. I’d take you in, if I had room.’

‘I know, Mister Howlett, sir, and I’m very grateful for the offer, but I have to stay. He’d have nobody, if I wasn’t there, and I still – there’s a reason I was left there.’

‘Load of shit, if you ask me,’ Mister Howlett says, and sends her on her way, because he’s going a little bit pink around the ears; he’s been told off for cursing around ladies again, no doubt.

 It makes her miss her apprentice something fierce, though. He’d been told off about the same, and there’d been something about the way he’d looked at her when he said it, like he wished to know her well enough to feel like he didn’t have to obey courtesy.

The twins bombard her as she’s got her nose in some flowers, and she almost swallows a begonia. Coughing at the pollen now in the back of her throat, she swats at them, and wipes the tears from her eyes.

‘You’re terrible!’ she croaks, and they just keep laughing at her.

‘Come, come,’ Wanda is insisting, when she’s got her breath back, and grabs her arm to pull her along. ‘I need your body.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Waving her free hand, because Wanda doesn’t care for speaking nicely, she continues to drag Laura through the crowd to their lodgings at the end of the row. It’s only a little place, two bedrooms and a communal space between, but it’s more than they’d had when Laura had met them, and they’re looking to move into real rooms soon.

‘Here,’ Wanda says, shoving Laura through the door.

Pietro had beaten them home, and is holding something red and ruffled in his hands.

‘We made you a dress!’ he says. ‘It isn’t finished. We need you to try it on to be sure it fits.’

Laura stops dead in the middle of the room, and stares at him.

‘You did what?’

‘We made you a dress! We thought – well, we knew – that the Baron wouldn’t give you a chance to have a dress made, or to make one yourself, but he can’t stop you going to the ball.’

‘He can, Piet, and he has. I’m not going.’

Pietro purses his lips, and then swears.

‘Nonsense!’ he says, and waves the dress at her. ‘You _will_ go to the ball! Now put this on!’

They bicker for a few more minutes about it, and then Laura puts the dress on. It’s a little big around the bust and hips, but Wanda pins it in and Pietro pins it up, and they chatter to each other as they do so, leaving Laura stood there like a mannequin, feeling very – very –

She’s flattered that they’ve done this, of course, the most grateful she thinks she’s been in her life. But she knows it’s going to end badly. The Baron has said no; presenting him with a dress, no matter how beautiful it is, will not change his mind, and will likely only anger him further.

If she is to go to the ball, she will have to sneak out of the house. He has already said that he will be going, that she is to stay in the house, that if he sees any evidence that she has been gone for even a minute, he will not be kind.

She sighs.

‘What’s wrong?’ Pietro asks. ‘Do you not like it? You look lovely in red.’

‘I love it,’ she assures him. ‘I do, it’s wonderful. But I’m thinking of the Baron, and what he will say.’

‘He cannot stop you,’ Wanda tells her. ‘It is a Royal Proclamation. I talked to Victor about it, and he says that if the Baron does not let you go, he could be arrested for defying the will of the Regent.’

Laura does not think that that will deter him at all, and says as such.

‘He doesn’t care,’ she says. ‘Being arrested doesn’t scare him.’

Wanda purses her lips and puts the last pin in place. ‘You can take the dress off now, we will have it finished by the ball.’

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to wear it.’

‘You will,’ Wanda assures her. ‘Even if we have to drive you there ourselves, you’ll go to the ball.’

Laura has seen Pietro’s idea of steering a carriage, and remembers the way the wheel bounced when it finally hit the dirt again, and her stomach rolls.

‘I’m sure I’ll find a way,’ she says, hurriedly. ‘If there is a way to find.’

‘That’s the spirit!’

* * *

 

Clint goes to the tailors a week before the ball, unannounced, and opens the door too quietly. On one of the mannequins is a dress made of that beautiful purple silk his lady had admired so fervently. It’s a beautiful dress, low on the shoulders and tight in the waist with a big full skirt. The tailor is on his knees, carefully embroidering roses along the hemline in a pretty thread that sparkles when it catches the light. He stands there for a second, watching the light play on the dress, and wondering who he’s been commissioned to make it for – certainly not Natasha, who has already professed her dress to be one of the most hideous ruffled monstrosities she can have made – and then the dog barks.

‘Lucky!’ he chides, and the tailor leaps a mile, hurrying to throw a muslin sheet over the dress to hide it from view.

‘Your Highness!’ he exclaims, ‘forgive me, I didn’t notice you were there! Is all well?’

Clint looks at the muslin for a second, and then figures that the tailor is entitled to make what he likes for whoever pays him to make things. Some lady in the courts, most likely, and he hopes the girl that it’s been made for is pretty.

‘I wanted to try my coat on again,’ he says, ‘I’ve been having some trouble with the breeches, and I wanted to be sure it fits smoothly.’

‘Of course, of course, let me fetch it.’

The tailor hurries off into his cupboards – it’s a full-time job, outfitting the royal household mostly by himself, fitting everyone from the maids to the Prince and Regent themselves, and many other aristocrats in-between – to fetch the coat. Clint is sorely tempted to take another peek at the dress, because the pattern of the roses on the embroidery at the neckline is already fading from memory, but he decides against it. The tailor doesn’t want him to see, and so he won’t look.

But he wants to.

Later, when he goes to see Phil for one thing or another that the Regent has sent him off to collect from the man, he asks about it.

‘The tailor’s making a dress,’ he says, and Phil hums from behind his book. ‘He hid it when he saw me there, it was in the loveliest purple silk.’

At this, Phil pauses, just long enough that Clint notices it – which is to say that he barely pauses at all, and it’s only Clint knowing to look out for these tiny little gestures that he sees it at all – and then smiles.

‘You’ve grown very fond of that word since meeting that girl, Your Highness, I do hope you expand your vocabulary before the ball.’

‘That word is for her alone,’ Clint says, ‘I have never seen someone so lovely, and I doubt I will see anyone as lovely again. I hope you haven’t made that dress for some princess you want me to meet and marry.’

‘Would I do a thing like that?’ Phil asks.

They both know damn well that Phil will have done exactly that, because the ball was an attempt to get him to find a suitable wife, and with every maiden in the kingdom there, how would he find this mystery girl of his? Hogwash.

 ‘Well, I hope you haven’t,’ Clint says, ‘the loveliest girl in the world will be coming to the ball, and I only intend on dancing with her.’

He collects what he came for, and heads back on his way, because Phil has the look of a man scheming on his face, and Clint doesn’t much want the lecture off the Regent about how he’d best be serving his kingdom marrying a woman of stature and breeding.

* * *

 

The ball approaches ever faster, and Laura does her best to argue her case every day, reminding the Baron that it would be treason for him to deny the Regent’s will, and that she had every right to attend the ball as the next girl.

‘And why should I not meet the Prince?’ she asks, because she is tired of having this discussion now. ‘What if he liked me? I would be out of your house and your life and you would not have to look at me a day longer.’

‘You would be my Queen,’ he snorts, ‘I would have to look at you any time I visited the palace.’

‘The Queen does not get involved in politics,’ Laura snorts back, ‘you would only have to see my portrait on the walls, and that would be much easier to ignore than my face.’

‘You’re not going to the ball.’

‘You cannot stop me,’ she tells him. ‘I am a subject of this kingdom, and personally invited to attend. I do not want to be arrested.’

‘Nobody knows you are alive,’ he tells her, cold, ‘to know to arrest you.’

That stops her dead. Of course people know she is alive, she talks to people daily. But she –

‘I am not on any papers?’ she asks, ‘I have no records?’

‘Of course not, you silly girl. You are not worth the paper your life would be written on. You are a servant, and I do not waste my resources on servants.’

 She feels choked, feels – feels –

Hurt does not encompass all she feels, but she doesn’t know any bigger words that describe the feeling in her chest any better.

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘So I ask you again,’ he says, and looks at her, so cold and so full of anger, ‘how would I be arrested if nobody knows you have not attended the Prince’s pathetic little party?’

She stands there for a moment, unsure what to do. In the end, she bursts into tears and flees to her attic hideaway, not caring that the Baron locks the door behind her.

* * *

 

Talking to Castle is an experience that Phil has not been in any hurry to have. This isn’t to say he is a terrible conversationalist, because he isn’t, but he makes his stance clear before he’s even opened the door.

To be fair to him, yelling “fuck off if you want me to police that shitshow,” is generally a very good way to get your point across.

From inside the house, there’s a woman’s snapped tone, another man stirring the pot, in the kind of tone that suggests he is _always_ doing so, and then the door opens. Phil has not seen Miss Page since before the rumours of her – indiscretion – started to spread, but she looks no worse for wear.

‘You want to see Frank,’ she says, ‘he doesn’t want to see you.’

‘I have a request from the Regent,’ he says, and Frank appears, all the lumbering weight of him, broken nose and heavy boots and all, in the doorway behind Miss Page.

‘I retired.’

He was removed from service, actually, following the deaths of his family. The stress of it was too much. Giving him the dignity of his grief was all they could do, even if it meant turning a blind eye to a few dead bodies in the street. An eye for an eye, or something like that, and Nick had been keen to remind them that there haven’t been any more bodies since then. Frank is keeping his nose clean, and he deserves that.

‘You did, but this is a task that requires – a delicate touch.’

Phil inclines his head slightly, a non-verbal emphasis that makes Miss Page groan and roll her eyes and throw her hands up as she leaves them to it.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘May I come in?’

‘No.’

Phil checks all his corners, sees nobody and then explains, in as few words as possible, the situation.

‘We need to bring a duchess in hiding to the palace for the ball, but she has a hired killer after her and we don’t know who.’

‘So you want a shield.’

‘I need someone good in a fight, if that’s what it comes to.’

Frank stares at him. It would be unnerving, if it wasn’t the same expression Clint gave him every morning before he’d had coffee.

‘Do I know the girl?’ he asks, and then, because it’s probably more important to him, ‘do I care?’

‘It’s the Harcourt heir,’ Phil says, quietly.

‘She’s dead. It was in the papers.’

Phil smiles that “sorry about that” smile he’s grown to be too good at. ‘Papers lie.’

‘I’ll be at the palace at five,’ Frank says, and shuts the door on him.

* * *

 

Laura doesn’t go into town much after that, and she makes it a point to avoid the twins. She feels guilty for it, for ducking into alleys and for hiding behind tall men chattering about meaningless nothingness whenever she spots either of them, but she can’t bear to face their disappointed faces. Even if she did sneak out to attend the ball, what would she do? She cannot present herself without papers, and she doesn’t know her family name to call upon that in lieu.

But her love of cheese proves to be her downfall; while visiting Angie for her overdose of flatbread, Wanda sees her and grabs her arm.

‘You’ve been avoiding us!’ she accuses, with a jab of a sharp finger in Laura’s sternum.

‘No,’ Laura protests, and swallows a mouthful of pepper. ‘No, no I was – ‘

Wanda looks at Angie, and then drags Laura away. ‘What’s wrong? What’s the monster done now?’

They sit at the fountain where a month ago, Laura had sat with her apprentice, and watch the last frantic dash to collect things for the ball; there are only days left, not even a full three.

‘I don’t have papers,’ Laura says, and looks at her scuffed shoes. ‘I was arguing with the Baron about it, about going to the ball, and he told me. I’m nothing, Wanda, I don’t exist.’

Wanda gives her a flat look.

‘Take my papers,’ she says. ‘You’re shorter than me, but we’ve got dark hair and you look young enough.’

Laura shakes her head, and says, ‘Wanda no, I can’t – what if they want me to marry the Prince? We’ll all end up in trouble.’

‘Nonsense,’ Wanda says, ‘you only want to see your apprentice, and besides, you’ll be home before midnight, won’t you? They’d never know, and nobody’s going to question it. I can tell Victor about it, in case somebody wants to tell him that I went to the ball.’

 Laura opens and closes her mouth, and tries to make up an argument, but Wanda’s jaw is set, and her hands are squeezing tight around her knuckles; there’s going to be no dissuading her.

‘Victor has enough money to hire a carriage,’ she adds, ‘so you won’t need Pietro to drive you, you’ll just have to sneak back out to us before you go, I wouldn’t risk him putting wheel marks in the dirt outside.’

Wanda thinks of everything, so much faster than Laura does, and she feels like she’s thought about all the possible situations in the world, in her daydreams during her chores.

‘I’d never be able to return the favour,’ Laura says.

Wanda snorts. ‘Invite me to your apprentice’s house when you’re married and have children,’ she laughs, ‘and name one after Pietro.’

Laura gives her such a disappointed look. ‘I’d never hear the end of it. Can’t I just name you Godmother?’

‘Absolutely not. Now, are you going to embarrass my brother, or not?’

‘I – Wanda, _thank you_.’

‘It’s what friends are for,’ Wanda waves a hand with a laugh. ‘Now go on, get back to the Baron. I’ll bring the dress by tonight, stay by the kitchen door.’

It turns out to be the only part of the plan Wanda had not considered more than not at all.

* * *

 

The dress is lovely, long and with beads and ribbons and bows and ruffles and such a wonderful shade of red that it brings out her hair and her eyes and makes the sunshine gold of her skin shine brighter still. The twins have outdone themselves, and she thinks, as she twirls to get a feel for the way it moves, that her apprentice will like it more than she does, and she never wants to take it off. It’s by far the nicest thing anybody has ever done for her, and nothing will ever be as nice.

It puts her in such a wonderful mood, so full of hope and vim and vigour that she doesn’t even really consider what she’s doing. The Baron has banned her from the downstairs, and she just has to wait for him to leave before she can rush to the stables and rush through the woods into town, where Victor will be waiting for her with a carriage. Pietro will go with her, just to make sure they get her home on time, but it’s all so carefully thought out.

The Baron hollers up to the attic to her – he’s locked her in, but the joke’s on him, she “lost” the spare key two weeks ago, and he hasn’t had a new one forged, so she can get herself out as soon as he’s gone – that he’s leaving. She hollers back that she’ll have tea ready for him when he’s back in the morning, which is surely when the ball will end.

She rushes to the window, and watches as he walks across the grounds to where his carriage is waiting. She watches him get in the carriage, and she watches it leave. Then she waits another minute, two, and rushes down the stairs, key in hand.

Her eagerness to go, her confidence with this plan, is so strong that she’s completed absorbed in saddling the horse, her old skewbald cob, nuzzling at her braids and huffing at her perfume, the little of it she has, which Pietro had gifted to her for her make-believe birthday, some honey and vanilla thing, and she’d been so terrified to wear it because she had no idea how he’d afforded it. But this was a special occasion, and if not now, then when?

So absorbed is she, wrapped up in her task, that she doesn’t hear the crunch of wheels on the gravel at the front of the house. She doesn’t hear the clack of shoes on the tiles in the kitchen, and she only becomes aware of the Baron when he grabs her by her braids, pulling her away from the horse. The pain is sharp and the shock is sudden, and her scream barely leaves her mouth before he’s throwing her to the ground. Her dress snags on the loose stones, and where the dirt is heaviest, there are also tears.

‘How dare you!’ he roars, and Laura scrambles to get to her feet. The Baron stamps on the dress, and a whole layer of ruffles tears off as she moves. ‘You thief! You liar! You wretch! I knew you’d be up to something!’

Laura lets the dress tear further to get away, and comes to her feet with rips above her knees and tears in her bodice and sleeves. She knows she’s crying, can feel her throat drying out with the salt of it, and can feel her breath coming in short sharp gasps, but she can’t let herself be overcome with it.

‘Why?’ she cries. ‘Why? I have every right to go!’

‘You have no right to go!’ he shouts back. ‘You have no papers! No family! No identity! And no fucking gratitude for your life! I should have left you to die in the gutter where you belong with that father of yours!’

She opens her mouth a few times, her tears stopped in their tracks with how outright – outright – ridiculous it was a thing to yell at her.

‘I didn’t ask for this!’ she screeches, grabbing her torn skirt in both hands and getting it up to her knees, ready to bolt. ‘I didn’t ask to be brought here and I didn’t ask to be left here! You must think me stupid if you think I want this life! I don’t want to be here, and you don’t want me here! I’m solving both our problems, you – you – _bastard_!’

It’s a decade of backhands and canings, a decade of sly comments and not-so-subtle putdowns pouring out of her guts, and the best she can come up with is _bastard_. Every man she’s ever conversed with would be ashamed of her, would say they taught her better.

But it doesn’t matter how weak the insult is; raising her voice is enough. The Baron lunges at her, grabs her hair and her arm, and she kicks, does her best to break free, but his grip is strong, and the pain of pulling at her hair brings enough tears to her eyes that it chokes her. It’s all she can do to keep up once he’s starts dragging her, and she trips over her skirt several times on the steps back into the house.

‘You can’t stop me!’ she tells him, because she might as well go whole hog now. ‘I’m going to the ball, they’ll come looking for me when I don’t arrive!’

‘Your little friends?’ the Baron scoffs, and tightens his grip on her hair to open one of the lockable cupboards. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you foul little brat, they’ll be lucky to see the night out.’

With that, he throws her into the cupboard, and she hits the back, tripping over herself, and lands hard. As she’s righting herself, fighting her words to try and demand answers about what he means, he’s slammed the doors shut and locked her in.

‘You monster!’ she yells, bangs on the doors, and his shadows passes the sliver of light between the doors. ‘You can’t do this!’

‘I have,’ he sneers, and bang on the doors back, the sound much louder in the tiny space. She can barely stand up straight, never mind get away from the echo. ‘And you’ll stay there until I’m back.’

And then, silence. He’s gone, and Laura is alone in a cupboard with a torn dress and tangled hair. Slumping to the bottom of the cupboard, she gives herself a few minutes to just sob, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

Then, when the tears have dried up, she sets about undoing all her braids and the pins aren’t good enough at all to get the lock open, not that there’s a way to, she thinks. Why would you be able to unlock the cupboard from the inside?

Hair down, breath regained, heart slowed, she sits there, and she thinks, and she thinks, and she thinks. The Baron will be gone until morning, and she’s sure he’ll go out of his way to not come back for days, just to spite her. Maybe he intends her to starve to death. The light is fading from the gap in the door, and her belly rumbles in hunger.

She kicks the door, out of lack of anything else to do.

The door knocks back.

‘Hello?’ says a man’s voice from behind the door.

Laura holds her breath, squints at the shifting shadows in the gap, barely visible in the dimness.

‘Hello?’ the man says again. ‘I don’t suppose that’s Laura in there, is it?’

She swallows. ‘Yes,’ she says.

There’s not much else she can do, besides stay in here.

A deep sigh from the man, and the doors jiggle. Some under-the-breath swearing, and then, ‘locked. Castle, can you get these open?’

Some heavy footsteps that Laura thinks she can feel in her bones, and then a loud bang, some more rattling of the doors.

‘Keep your head down in there,’ a second, gruffer, man says, and Laura curls into as small a ball as she can manage.

An enormous bang, and then the doors are swinging open, and large, rough hands grab her under the arms, haul her upright amid splinters and the broken remnants of the handles and lock.

‘Hello,’ says the first man again, and Laura, blinking to adjust to the dim light in the room, finds herself looking at the man from town, that had followed her back to her horse.

He’s dressed in the livery of a very well-to-do coachman, so well-to-do as to suggest he might be employed by the royal family, and the man still holding her upright looks far too big to be dressed as the footman, but dressed in the royal house’s livery he is. He’s got close-cropped hair and a broken nose, and Laura thinks she’s seen him about town once or twice, but so many of the labourers have broken noses these days.

She stares at them, and they stare back, and she feels like she’s about to cry again.

‘I – I beg your pardon,’ she says, and tugs herself free of the footman’s grip, staggering over the broken doors to safer, steadier ground. ‘I don’t – just who are you, sirs? You’ve – I don’t understand.’

‘My name is Phil Coulson,’ says the coachman, in a very gentle sort of voice. ‘And this is Frank Castle. We’ve come to take you to the ball.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- @frank: please don't kick doors open, you'll only hurt yourself.  
> \- whats all this plot? traitors? behind the scenes political shenanigans?  
> \- As always, comments are vastly appreciated, especially now that the story is picking up and we're getting into the meaty part of it! Next part: a very nice dance, a couple duels, a lot of shenanigans. Maybe even a kiss. And Vision, probably.


	5. A First Dance and a Duel or Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a ball, but nobody dies this time.
> 
> There is a cheek kiss or two instead, though, and it's very lovely.
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies~!

They go to the kitchen, and Laura sits heavily in a chair at the table. Frank goes to the door and looks out over the garden, while Phil potters about and makes her a very over-brewed cup of tea. But he tries, so she does her best to down the whole cup.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, when she’s done, because nobody has said anything at all for the last half-hour.

‘It’s a very long story,’ Phil says, and looks at her, at her red cheeks and her messy hair and torn dress. ‘And you really should be getting to the ball. Would you like a bath before you change? At the least, you should wash your face.’

Laura shakes her head, hand on her brow. ‘Change? Ball? Sir, I’m sorry, I’m not – I’m not going to the ball.’

‘Shut up,’ Frank grunts from the door. ‘You know how much shit I listened to getting that dress in the carriage? You’re going to the ball.’

Laura spreads her hands and then bangs them on the table. ‘Will someone please give me an honest answer!’

Phil sits at the table, and Frank stomps off out of the kitchen, grunting something about the dress, leaving them alone.

‘It’s a very long conversation, Laura,’ Phil says, ‘and I wouldn’t want to disturb your enjoyment of the night with all the things I have to tell you. I can tell you enough to understand, and we’ll reconvene at a later time, if you’re amiable.’

Laura gives him a flat look. ‘Just tell me something, sir.’

‘I was asked to bring you to the ball by the Regent himself,’ Phil tells her. ‘He is the reason that you were brought here as a child, for your protection. It was never meant to be permanent, but given that the Prince is due to marry, he thought it high time you were brought out of this – hiding –you have been stuck in.’

‘Hiding? Prince? I don’t _care_ about the Prince,’ she tells him. ‘I don’t even care about seeing him at the ball. I met a lovely gentleman in the woods, some weeks ago, and he told me he was an apprentice to a politician, and if he’s – perhaps you know him. He wore an _awful_ purple coat, and he’s blond. His ears stick out a little bit, when he faces you at an angle. And he had a thoroughbred, a palomino. He must have a very generous beneficiary to have a horse like that, and to wear purple beside.’

‘Oh,’ Phil says, and gives her such a wonderfully bright smile that she feels blinded. ‘Yes, I know him. Don’t worry, he’ll be at the ball, he’s already there.’

He says nothing more, even though as what he’d said begins to sink in she finds herself with more and more questions to ask, because Frank is returning with a dress that barely fits in his arms.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she breathes, and nearly falls out of her chair straining to look at it. ‘It’s beautiful.’

And it is. It’s absolutely wonderful; made of the purple silk she’d spent months admiring at the market, off-the shoulder with a full skirt, enormously full, embroidered with roses that glitter in the lamplight.

‘You like it?’ Phil asks her, as Frank lays it on a chair and steps back to put matching shoes down.

‘Like it?’ Laura asks, ‘I couldn’t possibly wear it! This is the dress of a Queen, not a – a – oh, I don’t have papers! The Baron said – ‘

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Phil tells her. ‘And of course you can wear the dress; I had it made especially for you.’

‘For me? You – why would you do that? This dress must be worth so much!’

Phil shrugs, and folds his arms. ‘You’re worth more than this, Laura. I promise you, what you are worth makes this dress not worth a penny.’

 She gapes at him, and looks at the dress again.

‘I – oh, it’s lovely! Oh, um, er – there’s a screen, just over there, I can change behind that.’ Then she looks at her hands, dirty from the fall in the mud. ‘I’ll have to have a quick wash, I think, though. I wouldn’t want to get the dress dirty.’

‘Done and done. If you need help to lace the back, Mister Castle is familiar with that sort of thing.’

The look Frank gives him, the screen in his hands, is poisonous. Laura stifles a giggle behind her hand and he turns a gentler glare to her, which only makes her giggle all the more.

‘I’ll get you some water,’ he tells her, with a friendly wrinkle of his nose, and dumps the screen between them, hiding her and the dress.

 Laura hurries to get clean and change her dress, feeling guilty for the ruins of the dress the twins had made her, because it was a very lovely dress, but this new dress is – it really is the dress for royalty. It’s the most lovely and certainly the most expensive thing she’s ever seen, and as she slips into it, it’s softer than anything she’s ever worn, moving like water against her skin.

‘I don’t think I can do the lacing,’ she admits, after a few attempts to tug them tight go awry.

‘Alright,’ Frank says, and comes around the screen to make short work of the task. ‘You look beautiful.’

She blushes, and whispers a thank you as he knots the ribbons off.

‘There you go, that should keep you decent.’

At that, Phil snorts, and then clacks his jaw, like he wanted to say something and then changed his mind. Laura wonders what it was that he wanted to say, but Frank is taking the screen away, and Phil’s jaw drops.

‘You really are beautiful,’ he says, and bows his shoulders, just a little. ‘You just need to – have you a tiara?’

‘I have a brooch,’ she says, ‘it was my mother’s.’ She turns to the twin’s dress, and retrieves the brooch. ‘I can always pin it into my hair.’

Phil shakes his head. ‘We have a tiara for you, but wear the brooch. I think it will – Nick will be happy to see it.’

‘Nick?’

‘The Regent,’ he corrects, and offers her a smile. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to collect before we go?’

She shakes her head, pins the brooch to her collar. ‘No, there’s nothing.’

‘Then, if you’re ready, we’ll be on our way. No doubt the ball will already be in full swing by the time we arrive.’

‘The twins!’ Laura says then, ‘they’ll be worried that I haven’t come.’

‘I sent a messenger to them,’ Phil tells her, and gestures for her to lead the way. She lifts the skirt and her heels clack for the first time in her life. ‘They know you’re in safe hands, and understand that you won’t be arriving.’

‘I still don’t understand everything,’ she says, and then her jaw drops at the sight of the carriage waiting them.

It’s a golden, filigree-laden work of art, something she thinks she only ever saw in dreams, unable to believe such a thing could be real.

‘Oh my,’ she says, and Phil laughs.

‘Come along, my Lady,’ he says, and extends a hand to help her into the carriage. ‘Your Apprentice awaits.’

Frank stands at the back of the carriage, watching the scenery as Phil climbs into the driver’s seat and sets them on their way.

 Laura has never seen the woods like this before, through the gilt window of a carriage, never had such beauty around her, never been able to just sit and – and relax. Goodness, she’s never been able to _relax_ before now, but here she is, relaxing away, just enjoying the rock of the carriage. Frank is muttering to himself, barely audible over the crunch of the wheels, and she tunes him out, mulling over what Phil had said, and after some time, she leans forward, to where she can see him on the bench at the front of the carriage through the open filigree.

‘Mister Coulson, sir,’ she says, and when he hums, she continues, ‘you said that the Regent saved my life, and put me into the Baron’s care. Why would he do that? Is it to do – I remember that my father died, when I was young, is that why?’

For a minute, Phil doesn’t answer, and stares straight ahead.

‘I do not want to ruin your evening, Laura,’ he says.

‘You’ll ruin it more if you don’t answer, because then I’ll be thinking about the answers, instead of my Apprentice.’

At this, he laughs, and admits that she may be right.

‘It was related, after a fashion, to your father dying,’ Phil tells her. ‘I don’t want to go into too much detail, and the story is the Regent’s to tell, when it comes to it, because he was there, and I was not. But yes, your father and he were working together, and your father died in a – I suppose bandits, is the word to use. Your carriage was set upon, and your father died helping you and the Regent escape.’

Laura considers this.

‘They say the Regent has only one eye,’ she says. ‘Is that why?’

Phil laughs again. Even Frank, behind them, chuckles.

‘She’s got my vote,’ Frank says.

Phil tuts. ‘You don’t vote, don’t be silly. Now hush up, we’re nearly there.’

Laura goes to lean out of the window to look at the approaching palace, but Frank’s hand finds the top of her head and shoves it back into the carriage.

‘Don’t get yourself killed now,’ he says.

She pouts, but does as she’s told.

They draw up on the palace steps, and Frank hops down to open the door and help Laura out of the carriage. The guards give her a cursory glance, but otherwise ignore her, and she’s grateful for it, because she’s not very graceful with all the chiffon and silk and flamboyance in her skirts. Frank keeps his grip steady, though, and helps her to the steps. Phil appears at her other side, and he leads her up.

‘We’ll be fine from here, Mister Castle, thank you,’ he tells Frank, who nods, and disappears before Laura has a chance to thank him for helping her. ‘Come, Laura, the ball awaits.’

She takes his offered arm, and they make their way up to the palace.              There’s an awful lot of noise coming from inside, and a lot of light and laughter, and Laura doesn’t think she’s ever heard such noise, even on the midsummer market. There are men and women bustling about as they make their way through the palace corridors, talking and drinking and laughing, and too many heads turn to look at her as she passes them.

‘They’re looking,’ she whispers to Phil.

‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘I should imagine so.’

She feels the heat in her cheeks, and doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. So she keeps her gaze on the tiles, on making sure one foot goes in front of the next, and then Phil’s opening a door, and she’s all of a sudden completely alone. She glances behind her as the guards on the door give her a confused glance, but then step aside to let her in.

A few dozen heads turn to look at her, and she stops in her tracks, staring back. She’s in –

This must be the ballroom, she thinks, looking at all the pretty dresses, and all the gentlemen, and all the not-so-subtle guards. It’s a wonderful room, large and airy and full of life, and she finds herself licking her lips, her throat too dry. A heavy, too-long moment passes, and then the doors shut behind her, and the heads turn back to what they were doing before, and she’s back to being ignored.

A deep sigh she didn’t realise she was holding escapes her, and she lifts her skirts just enough to make it safely down the stairs and onto the floor, where her elbow is immediately grabbed by a ruffled monstrosity.

‘You must be Laura,’ says the woman in the monstrosity.

She’s really very pretty, with red hair pinned elegantly atop her head, wearing a sparkling kokoshnik tiara and diamonds around her throat, and green eyes that make her feel very small indeed. Her smile is as small as Laura feels, but very warm, and her hand is gentle.

‘I’m Natasha,’ she says, and she has a very thick accent, but it’s pleasant, slow and long like the first coffee in the carafe.

‘Natasha,’ Laura repeats, and her brain takes a second to catch up. ‘Oh, my goodness! Your Highness, I – forgive me.’

The Grand Duchess! The Grand Duchess, the one that everyone talks about in town, who makes all the ladies lose their heads over the latest fashions, she’s on her arm and smiling at her like she knows all of Laura’s secrets!

Natasha squeezes her arm, ever so softly. ‘Hush, little bird,’ she says, and begins to walk Laura around the edge of the room, towards another set of stairs. ‘I am just a girl, same as you.’

Laura does not think Natasha is the same as her at all, because Natasha is the Grand Duchess and Laura is a paperless serving girl wearing a dress she has no right to.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks, because Laura is not entirely daft.

‘To see the Regent,’ Natasha says, ‘of course. He’s desperate to see you, I think. He hides these things, but I know him well.’

Laura does not understand, but keeps her mouth shut for now. She knows she won’t get any answers from the Grand Duchess.

‘Nick,’ Natasha says, and the Regent turns.

He’s a very tall man, and even though Laura has seen his portrait around town, she remembers his face like a long-forgotten dream, though she remembers it with much more blood, and younger, too. He’s dressed very finely, in a wonderful black military uniform, his boots gleaming and his epaulets a shining silver.

‘Thank you, Natasha,’ he nods, and the Grand Duchess swishes off. Laura imagines she always swishes. You don’t get that good at swishing without practice. ‘Laura, it has been a long time.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I suppose it has.’

He smiles at her then, and she smiles back, even though she knows, in her belly, that there will be no answers from him either, not for the moment.

‘Your apprentice is somewhere around here,’ he says, and gestures at the throng of people on the floor. ‘In that cacophony of noise, with his dog no doubt.’

‘Dog?’ she asks, and as if on cue, a dog starts barking.

A man yells, ‘I swear to the last holy shrine on this earth, if you don’t get that bloody dog – ‘ only to be interrupted by another man yelling about him minding his manners.

The Regent sighs.

‘He’s somewhere,’ he says, ‘you’d best find him. He’s looking for you.’

She looks at him, but his lone eye is very unreadable, and his smile is empty beneath the amiable warmth.

‘Thank you,’ she says then, and lifts her skirts again. ‘For rescuing me that night, and for sending Misters Coulson and Castle to me tonight.’

‘The pleasure was all mine, dear Lady,’ the Regent says, and gestures her back down the stairs.

It seems a very pointless endeavour, for her to have been taken all the way up there by Natasha, but these political and royal types have their way, and Laura supposes she’ll never truly understand them, not really. And so back down the stairs she goes, one at a time to ensure she doesn’t trip as she goes, and the crowd parts, just enough, to let her through.

A breath passes, and a hush, peculiar and slow, falls across the ballroom. Laura looks at one face and then the next and the next, sees them looking at her, and then turning their heads, so she turns hers too, and finds herself looking at her apprentice. He looks wonderful, even as he stands stooped, his hands holding a golden retriever’s forepaws like they’re going to dance, and his jaw’s slightly agape, as though stopped mid-word. Laura swallows, and then smiles, because he’s as handsome as she’d remembered him, handsomer still, perhaps, because he looks like he might have washed twice behind his ears tonight, and then he lets the dog down, stands straight and tugs his coat straight.

It’s purple, but of course it’s purple, and his hair is combed, and he looks so – so –

‘You look lovely,’ he says, although it comes out in one breath so it sounds more like gibberish than a compliment.

She blushes from her hairline to her décolletage, and her smile broadens.

‘Your Highness,’ says a man at her apprentice’s side, with messy hair and a military dress uniform fitting very nicely. ‘You – ‘

‘Bucky,’ he says, and half holds his hand up, ‘it’s fine.’

The crowd has backed away a little, giving them room, and he takes a visible breath before striding towards her, still standing there dumbstruck, and takes both her hands in his.

‘You look lovely,’ he repeats, a little slower this time, a little louder. ‘And it would be the greatest honour if you would dance with me.’

She hesitates for just long enough that his expression shifts, and then she says, ‘I’d love to, but I don’t know how.’

At this, he laughs, and it’s the kind of laugh she’s a little bit in love with, only hearing it again makes it the kind of laugh she’s a lot in love with.

‘Maestro!’ he calls, still laughing, ‘your nicest waltz, if you please!’

A pretty little piece strikes up, and he glances up over her shoulder – at the Regent, she knows, can feel his one-eyed gaze on the back of her neck – and then he puts a hand on her waist, and the world closes in.

‘Just go with the beat,’ he says, ‘I’ll follow your lead.’

But she follows his, for a moment, hurrying as best she can to move her feet where his lead hers. It’s hard to focus; his hand is on her waist, and he’s holding her hand with the other, and he’s warm, and right there, and she can’t look away from him any more than he can look away from her. The crowd of overdressed ladies and gentlemen has disappeared from her periphery, so all she sees is her apprentice and the way he smiles at her as he dances her around the floor.

‘I’m going to spin you,’ he says, and Laura remembers, vaguely, her father spinning her when she was little.

‘Yes,’ she says, and he spins her.

The way her dress spins and lifts makes the ladies in the crowd ooh and ahh, and then he’s pulling her in for a lift that takes her breath away, leaving her laughing and clutching at him to get her feet back on the ground.

‘You, sir,’ she starts, but then Natasha is hollering over the crowd.

‘When Your Highness has quite finished, the rest of us want to dance too!’

It causes a ripple of laughter to echo across the ballroom floor, and it breaks the spell. Laura is dazed and out of breath, but her apprentice is laughing, and then there are other couples dancing too, and he’s grabbing her hands, threading her through the crowd and through a side door, into blissful quiet.

‘I’m Clint, by the way,’ he says, squeezing her hand. ‘I think it’s really time I introduced myself.’

‘Laura,’ she replies, squeezing back. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Your Highness.’

Clint pulls a face at her, all sticking out tongue and rolled eyes, and gestures for her to continue walking. So she does, and they click-clack down the corridor, past guards and servants and while Laura does her best to not look any of them in the eye, Clint pays not a single one of them any mind.

‘You probably shouldn’t have left the ball,’ she tells him.

‘Probably,’ he says, cheerfully, and pushes a door open with one hand, still holding tight onto hers with the other. ‘But Phil will know where I’ve gone.’

‘Phil?’ she asks, and then, ‘you mean Mister Coulson? He looked very put-upon, I hope you don’t give him a hard time.’

At this, Clint laughs, too loud for the quiet of the corridor they step into, but it’s a genuine, happy laugh, and she finds it warms her skin, and the air around them.

‘Of course I do! It’s his job to have a hard time with me. No – I kid, I kid – I’m as good to him as I can be; I wouldn’t know half the politics I know without him.’

‘So you’re his apprentice?’ she asks, and gives him a coy smile when he looks over his shoulder at her.

‘And Nick’s too. I’m the apprentice of the kingdom, I suppose, when you get down to it, being the prince and all.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks.

‘Do you blame me? You saw them out there, all that – that – power-hungry eyeballing. I don’t want that. I want – I wanted to be just a man, for a change. And you were so genuine, so nice and open and you treated me as an equal. Is that bad of me? To keep it from you?’

Laura looks at him then, his eyes blue and his expression open with blatant hope, and she smiles, takes his other hand to look up at him with what she hopes is acknowledgement, acceptance, something worth looking at, on her face.

‘No,’ she assures him. ‘I don’t blame you at all, and I think it was only a little bit rude. I was just as rude for not telling you who I was.’

‘And who are you?’ he asks, ‘You said you were a servant, but this dress was in our tailor’s not yesterday.’

She flushes and looks down at it, glimmering in the corridor’s low light and the fireworks still exploding outside the window.

‘Mister Coulson brought it to me,’ she says, ‘he says he had it made especially for me. He said something about the Regent, and how he – he – he wouldn’t tell me what, exactly, but the Regent saved my life, and he wanted me to come to the ball tonight, so here I am.’

‘He saved your life?’ Clint asks, and then shakes his head, looks down the corridor to where a guard is standing, looking impassive, but there. ‘Come this way, I want to show you something.’

She cocks her head, but nods, and lets him lead her out of the corridor through a small, inconspicuous enough door that turns out to lead outside. It’s dark out, with moonlight and the fireworks casting everything into shades of grey and gold, and the garden is quiet. Clint lets go of her hand to open a gate, and she gathers her skirt to make her way along the path.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks.

‘I’ve never taken anyone here,’ he says, and turns to head down another path to a door in a wall, ‘it was my mother’s private garden, before she died. I’ve done my best to take care of it over the years.’

‘Your mother’s?’ she replies, and has to grip her skirt tight to get it through the door.

The garden isn’t particularly big, but that’s mostly because of the large tree and several towering rose bushes filling the space. It’s walled off, totally enclosed except for the door, with a small grassy area, big enough for a picnic blanket, and a swing strung up from one of the branches of the tree.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, because it is.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I agree.’

But when she glances at him, he’s not looking at the garden, but at her, with something soft on his face.

 It makes her flush, and she turns away to admire the roses, in magnificent shades of purple and red and yellow, growing over her head and just beginning to bloom.

‘I’ve never seen roses in this colour,’ she says, reaching up to touch one of the fully-bloomed ones, but she can’t quite reach it. ‘I wonder how long they took to breed.’

‘They were my mother’s favourite,’ Clint says, too close to her ear, and when she flinches, he laughs, puts a gentle, warm hand on her hip. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump – I was only – ‘

Here, he pauses, and she sees his hand reach above them, snapping the rose from its stem with a careful press of his thumbnail. If she were even a little more foolish, she might say she could feel his heartbeat against her back from the way he stretches, but really she can just feel the brush of his coat against the bare skin of the back of her shoulders, and the vague sensation of the heat of him.

He hands her the rose, hand still on her hip, and the other joins it when she takes it. His chin drops ungracefully, but most certainly welcome, onto her shoulder, and she does her best to not be taken in by how natural it feels, how right and perfect and – and – _meant to be_.

She knows, in her belly, as she inhales the smell of the rose and focuses on all the layers to it, like the sweetest perfume, that she will never be able to marry him, and that this night, these few moments, they will be all she has. So she intends to savour them, as best she can, commit them to a memory stronger than the vague sensations of her childhood.

‘Keep it,’ he whispers, his fingers pressing just so, and she wonders if he’s thinking the same things. ‘So you can remember me.’

Yes, then.

The air turns melancholy, and they stay there for a moment, just savouring the warmth of the other, the beauty of their cheeks brushing, Laura with the rose in her hands and Clint with Laura in his. Then Clint turns his head just enough to press his lips to her jawline, and straightens up.

‘Come,’ he says, ‘let me push you on the swing.’

The dourness breaks into a soft laugh from Laura, and she tucks the rose into her hair, holding it in place with the tiara Mister Coulson had given her in the carriage.

‘I don’t think I’ve been on a swing since I was a little girl.’

‘Then let me have the honour of changing that,’ Clint smiles.

* * *

 

Steve is not fit to dance, fatigued by the noise and the to-do, and all the perfume the ladies have sprayed on themselves has him sneezing through two handkerchiefs and several serviettes. Bucky stops by periodically on patrol, when overzealous (and incredibly drunk) working girls drag him into dances like they think he knows the steps don’t get him first, and checks in to make sure he’s both alive and on the lookout. They know Clint has disappeared off with his mystery girl, who, so Steve’s digging over the past month has uncovered, is called Laura and may very well be that same Laura who was announced missing a decade ago when her father was killed by bandits in a coach she was supposed to have been travelling in.

They say digging, because it gives Steve the remotest air of secrecy; really, he’d just gone into town, found the local wives and asked the right questions while they cooed and fussed over his tiny wrists and pretty sketches. Steve has a way with the local housewives that neither Bucky nor Sam have, and they suspect it’s because he’s a Good Boy with Nice Manners, but they’ll never give him the impression that he’s actually better at something than they are, because then he might turn it into a force to be reckoned with and he’s dangerous enough without knowing what to exploit.

So for several nights, they’d sat beside the dying embers of the fire of the drawing room, heads together, Steve, Bucky, Sam and Natasha, when she’d not been otherwise occupied with keeping Clint out of trouble, and they’d tried their best to put the evidence they’d gathered together. The sticking point had been where the leak had come from, because there was definitely a leak in the palace, and someone was organising things to come to a head at the ball, but they couldn’t put their fingers on who. They all had suspicions, and they were all in the same area of it being Pierce, because Pierce had been a thorn in everyone’s sides from the beginning of his tenure on the Council, but they had nothing solid to provide the Regent. At least he hadn’t laughed his Captains’ suggestions out of the room, and had only nodded in that kind of way he had when they’d hit on something he hadn’t wanted them to but was pleased they’d worked it out on their own because it meant _they_ weren’t the leak.

Which meant that they were all on high alert for whatever was about to happen.

Not that they knew _what_ was happening, just that it was. So there were plenty of false alarms in the form of too-handsy young gentlemen and too-energetic working girls, and a couple of scandalised mothers. It was all too much for Steve, but as Bucky throws himself into the seat beside Steve for a much-needed five seconds and a glass of wine that Steve had been holding for half an hour, he finds himself watching a particularly cross-looking gent across the ballroom.

‘By the pillar,’ he says, in as low a tone as he can manage. ‘In the black coat. He has a monocle and a shaved head.’

‘Unfashionable old prick,’ Bucky says from behind his glass, but nods to acknowledge Steve’s find. ‘That’s Baron Strucker; fuckin’ asshole, last I heard. Coulson can’t stand him.’

Phil likes almost everyone, so Steve understands, so for him to outright admit disliking someone, that was a serious thing indeed.

‘Can’t stand him?’

‘Oh, you know how Coulson is with all his busy-bodying and that. Doesn’t say it outright, but he actually said that he loathes going to the Baron’s house every time he has to go. Doesn’t go often, but we all know about it when he does, he’s always in a foul temper when he gets back.’

Steve hasn’t really ever noticed Phil be in a bad temper, given his geniality, but then he’s mostly seen the poor man be exasperated by Clint running amok.

They sit there and watch the Baron talking; as far as they know, he doesn’t have any children, or any working girls to accompany to the ball, so really, he has no reason to be here. He’s certainly not in the process of looking for a wife, given that he’s talking to a small, mousy-looking bald man with spectacles in the palace staff’s dress uniform.

Bucky downs the last of the wine, and puts it back in Steve’s hands.

‘I’d best get back to work,’ he says, in the kind of voice that suggests he wants to just curl up next to Steve in the plush armchair in the drawing room and go to sleep, and goes to get to his feet when they see the mousy man nod and stride for a side door.

It’s the kind of stride of a man who needs to move fast without being detected, and it shines like a beacon amongst all the giggling couples.

They glance at each other, and when they look back at the Baron, he’s staring straight at him.

‘You need to find out who that was,’ Steve whispers, but Bucky is already long gone, disappeared into the crowd like a ghost.

A difficult feat for a man as charismatic and unfashionably styled as Captain Barnes is, but gone he is.

Steve looks at the glass in his hands, and then to where the Baron has now also vanished.

‘Shit,’ he hisses, and scans the crowd for any sign of Natasha or Sam, or even Phil.

But he can’t see anyone, and walking through the crowd looking for them tires him at the thought, so he heads around the edge of them to the stairs to tell the Regent.

* * *

 

They spend what feels like a lifetime talking, about everything and nothing. Clint tells her about his mother, and about the aftermath of his parent’s death, about being an apprentice, about his dog. He admits to being scared of taking the throne, admits that he’s worried he’ll do worse than his father, admits that he finds so many flaws with the system as it is, that he wants to change, that he wants to abdicate like his brother did. Laura tells him what little she remembers of being a child, tells him about the work she does at the Baron’s house, about the twins and the nice people at the market and how Mister Howlett once punched a man in the face for trying to look down Laura’s dress.

He goes a little puce-coloured at this, because Clint has been raised with Dignity and Manners and not a little bit of jealousy over the idea of not being able to punch people in the face when they do something rude to people he cares about, and Laura laughs at his expression and has to kiss his cheek when he pouts about it.

It’s wonderful, so easy and relaxed, and they lie in the grass and stare at the fireworks and just hold hands and talk and then fall silent before talking some more. They can hear the music, and Clint asks her to dance again, so she kicks off her shoes and he takes off his coat and it’s much more fun than when they danced in the ballroom. He even dips her, entirely against protocol, and she’s still laughing with her head upside down when the door opens and Mister Coulson appears.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ he says, ‘the Regent has requested your presence. Both of you.’

Laura immediately pales and fights to get herself upright. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, stumbling over her words, ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’

‘And you haven’t,’ he assures her, ‘he just wants to talk to you both, is all. All good things, I hear.’

‘Yes,’ Clint says, with a wrinkle in his nose, ‘and you said that lecture about not shooting apples off the tree was going to be a positive talk.’

Laura, balancing to put her shoes on, asks what on earth he was doing that for, and the discussion of Clint’s archery skills and the practice thereof takes them all the way back to the ballroom.

* * *

 

‘What do you think?’ Natasha asks, and Nick shakes his head.

‘Too early to tell,’ he says, ‘but I have hope. Yes, I know, _me_ , having hope.’

Natasha smiles, and lays a too-nice hand on his arm. Without saying anything at all, Nick hears everything, and whispers some very choice words under his breath. She squeezes his arm, and sits back in her chair.

‘All that dancing has me tired,’ she announces, ‘I shall retire soon, I think. Just as soon as His Highness returns from his canoodling.’

Sam snorts, and Natasha tells him that she has been waiting for an opportunity to say canoodling for weeks.

‘You taught me that word,’ she says, and he raises his hands.

‘How awful of me,’ he tells her, and somehow continues to have a very serious expression on his face. ‘I shan’t do it again, Grand Duchess, a thousand apologies.’

If she wasn’t so pinned by her awful disaster of a dress, she’d have kicked him, and he even steps out of the way as though she would have done it.

Bucky leaps up the stairs three at a time and is out of breath by the time he gets to where the Regent is sitting.

‘Sire,’ he pants, and makes a vague gesture like he’d have bowed, but he’s mostly holding onto his ribs. He should have eaten more before he downed that wine, the rich people pisswater always sits wrong in his belly when it’s empty.

‘Captain Barnes.’

‘The leak. We, uh – Steve – they know she’s here.’

The Regent looks at him.

‘Lady Harcourt, sir, the leak knows you were planning on bringing her here, and they’ve come to – whatever. Kill her. Kidnap. Murder and mayhem, you know how these things go.’

The Regent continues to look at him. Bucky wonders if he’s even spoken words, or he’s just made animal noises.

‘Yes,’ the Regent says after a moment has passed. ‘I know. I was waiting to see who the leak was.’

‘I don’t know his name, but I could point him out in a crowd. Little man, spectacles, bald but still young.’

Sam grunts, and when Bucky looks at him, he says, ‘his name’s Sitwell. He’s been one of Pierce’s little toadies for a while. You see him tailing around him the way Phil does the Regent.’

‘Samuel,’ Natasha chides, playful, even though her expression is as serious as grief. ‘You should know better than to call our dear Phil a toadie. He’s a froggie, at the very least.’

Sam doesn’t dignify it with a response, goes to the banister to look out over the dancefloor. Now he knows what to look for, the signs are so visible; the men standing around the edge of the room, looking too nonchalant for men looking for dances, with no women approaching them, familiar or not. He’d seen them, of course, but there were always reclusive types at the ball; hell, Steve had come and nobody had spoken to him either.

‘The Baron is on it as well,’ Bucky adds, ‘the one the Duchess lives with.’

‘I thought as much,’ the Regent nods, and there’s a clatter from the stairs.

Steve has dropped his empty glass halfway up, having not thought to get rid of it before trying to rush up there, because of course he didn’t.

‘Regent,’ he pants, and Bucky hops down the steps to grab him and get him up the stairs. ‘Clint’s going to – he’s going to get into a fight over this.’

‘I know,’ the Regent assures him, ‘but I have my people in place, too.’

‘You mean Castle,’ Natasha says, ‘I wouldn’t pin too much on him getting involved outright. The man is good in a fight, but he is not – invested – in the outcome.’

The Regent nods. ‘He’ll get involved if he has to, but I was talking about you boys.’

Bucky and Sam look at him with equal expressions of exasperated annoyance. Of course the Regent expects them to get into the life-saving business, that’s exactly what they were hired for, only instead of saving Clint’s sorry behind, they’ve got to save the girl.

Of course.

‘I’ve called for them,’ the Regent says then, ‘both Clint and Laura, and they should be along shortly. Be on guard for trouble.’

Sam and Bucky look at each other, and then Bucky pats Steve’s shoulder and they head back down the stairs to get into the crowd. Natasha pats the chair beside her, and Steve reluctantly takes a seat, knowing full well that if a fight does break out, he’ll only get in the way. Not that he’s not one to fight, because he’s been in more fights than Sam and Bucky combined, and they’re in training twice a week. But the air suggests a ruthlessness that will get him killed, and that would be really inconvenient for him right now.

It’s only when the doors open to allow Clint and Laura back into the ballroom, with Phil leading them, that it becomes abundantly clear what’s about to happen. The crowd is whispering, motionless, trapped by their own uncertainty about who the fight is going to be between, only knowing that there is going to be one.

‘What’s going on?’ Laura whispers, and Clint shakes his head.

‘I don’t know. But you’re safe. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.’

Because he knows, in his gut, what is happening. Nobody told him anything, but he’s not stupid, he knows. Laura is the Duchess he was supposed to marry, the one arranged at their birth, before his parents died. Her disappearance after her father died, the Zemos moving into the Harcourt estate in marriage and proxy, it all adds up. They want her dead, but she’d been in the Baron’s house under the Regent’s protection. Nothing could happen to her there, because nobody knew where she was, but the Baron had given her up finally, and now they knew how to get her. There was more to it, he was sure, some great slight a generation ago that had them set on this path, but he couldn’t care less about that. Someone wanted Laura dead, but Clint would get them first.

There’s a scuffle from inside the crowd, and Clint looks away from Laura to see Castle dragging a writhing mass of suit out of the throng of people, and he wrinkles his nose.

‘ _Sitwell_? Are you serious?’

Castle deposits Sitwell on the tiles in front of Clint, leaves him sprawled across the floor and struggling to get his feet under him.

‘ _This_ is the leak?’ Clint sneers, and then looks up to Castle. ‘Thank you. Get the guards at the gates, do a perimeter. I don’t want more of them coming in.’

Castle gives him a half-bow, barely a nod of the head, and the crowd parts to let him through, stomping all the way. The door swings shut behind him, and the crowd whispers some more.

Sitwell is on his feet, tugs at his jacket, straightens his spectacles. He looks very calm and collected, but there’s a tightness to the corner of his eyes, and they dart around the room, refusing to settle on anyone or anything in particular.

‘You obviously have a neat little plan hatched,’ Clint says, because that much is obvious and he has to start somewhere. ‘Someone took offence at something, and decided that ending my marriage before it even starts is a good way to get recompense.’

‘Oh, heaven’s no,’ Sitwell laughs, ‘getting rid of Duchess Harcourt is only the first step. We have our sights set much higher than that measly little throne.’

Natasha rushes down the stairs and before anyone can grab her, she rears back and swings her fist straight into Sitwell’s face. It doesn’t do nearly as much damage as she’d like it to, having been restricted by the damnable corset and ruffles, but she still knocks his head to one side and makes him spit blood.

‘You are the worst of the worst,’ she snarls. ‘The lowest kind of cretin. Traitors disgust me.’

‘You flatter yourself too much,’ Sitwell tells her, and it’s only Sam’s hands on her arms that stop her lunging at him again. ‘I don’t care what you think, and never have, Duchess. You do not factor into this.’

There’s a lot she looks like she could say, but Sam is bent over to whisper in her ear, and she stands there panting like a bull before going to Laura to grab her arm and keep her close. She might be in a corset and a dress that weighs more than she does, but she’s still got a meaner right hook than anyone else in the girl’s arm length. Laura, for her part, looks confused and lost and like she’s about to cry or scream, or maybe both. Everyone else has pieces of this, has mostly understood what’s been happening through the politics of the palace and the history of the kingdom, but the poor girl is so innocent of all of it, so unaware of what her existence means, so unaware of _who she is_ in its most fundamental state that it makes Clint’s blood boil. She’d said that this was the first ball she’d ever attended, that she had never imagined she might meet a man who would see her as more than a smear of soot on her cheek, that she had never set her sights on anything worth having, and that this was the best night of her life. And here was Sitwell and his fucking plan, ruining it.

Clint draws his sword, and points it in Sitwell’s face. The whispers of the crowd go silent, and it echoes across the marble floor and pillars, bouncing off the ceiling until it becomes deafening.

‘You are a traitor,’ he says, ‘and you’ll be punished as one. Have you got anything to say, _sir_?’

‘You think I am a traitor,’ Sitwell says, lifting his chin, ‘but I serve a different king faithfully.’

The answer is not difficult to come to.

‘Pierce.’

The silence hangs too thick and too heavy, and the staring match feels like one cough away from breaking into a brawl. Clint, with his sword drawn and pointed at Sitwell, Sam and Bucky with their hands on their swords and their feet planted, Laura behind them with Natasha holding her arm. The crowd are terrified, waiting with bated breath for the outcome, whatever it is.

And then the doors at the top of the main stairs swing open, and a man walks through. Tall, with a bloody sword in hand, wearing the darkest black military coat. He has two sashes crossed over his chest, with white epaulettes on each shoulder, and a full mask in black over his face. Laura has only ever seen ladies of money wear full-face masks, and it – it –

‘I know him,’ she whispers to Natasha, twisting to grab the Duchess’ arm. ‘I know him, I know him! He – he killed my father! He tried – he tried to kill me!’

Natasha looks at her, and then sharply up at the man, the assassin, walking calmly down the stairs, his boots clicking against the marble and ringing in the silence.

Clint looks over his shoulder at them, taking in the grey pallor of Laura’s face, the wideness of her eyes, the twist of her body. Then he turns back to the assassin as he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

‘Duchess!’ he calls, ‘it has been many, many years! I hope you are well.’

Laura does not reply, just stares at him, at the blank face of the mask.

‘Why do you want to kill me?’ she yells, ‘what did I do to you? I was a child!’

‘It’s nothing _personal_ , Your Grace. I am simply, fulfilling a contract.’

‘From who?’ Clint demands, ‘and why? She’s done nothing to deserve death.’

‘She exists,’ the assassin tells him, with an incline of his head like he might be smiling. ‘That is all it takes for some people. She is a detriment to a greater plan. I’m sure Sitwell will tell you everything you’d like to know, he’s never been good at keeping secrets.’

Sitwell looks like he’s trying very hard to not look like he’s going to piss himself.

Bucky steps forward, draws his sword.

‘I’m not going to ask you to leave politely,’ he warns, and the man laughs.

It isn’t a nice sound.

‘There is no need to ask politely, Captain,’ he says, and raises his sword, ‘I won’t be going anywhere.’

Bucky lunges, and the man knocks his sword away, kicks Bucky off his feet and into the crowd. In the immediate screaming and commotion that the action causes – people running away, ladies fainting and Bucky hollering curses as he rights himself – Natasha drags Laura’s arm.

‘Run!’ she hisses, and Laura does as she’s told, kicking off her shoes to move easier.

The assassin is not far behind, striding through the throng of people like they aren’t even there.

‘Sam!’ Clint barks, not taking his eyes or his sword point off Sitwell. ‘Be my second!’

There isn’t really a need for a second here, and everybody knows it. Clint is more than capable of dealing with Sitwell here, but that’s not his intent, and they know that too.

‘Sir!’ Sam nods, and draws his sword, steps up to take his place.

Sitwell sneers, but his eyes are panicked. ‘Is the Prince a coward?’ he asks, as Clint lifts his blade to give Sam space. ‘Unable to complete any duel, isn’t that right? You’ve not fought a duel in your life, _Prince_. Ever so charming, always able to wriggle out of any real responsibility. You were always - ’

Clint isn’t paying any mind to the words being called to the back of his head, jogging for the doors Laura and the assassin had vanished through, but he doesn’t need to – they’re cut off by the deafening crack of rib where Sam’s boot heel has connected smoothly with Sitwell’s chest and knocked him off his feet.

‘Another insult and it’ll be your face,’ he warns, moving to pin Sitwell with his sword on his cheek, pressing just enough to draw blood.

‘Pathetic,’ Sitwell sniffs, but doesn’t dare move.

‘Do you want me to kill him?’ Bucky asks, ‘I don’t mind dragging him behind my horse for a few hundred feet and leaving him to the wolves.’

‘No,’ Sam says, ‘no, I can handle this. You go after the Prince, make sure he doesn’t get himself killed by that – whatever it is.’

‘Monster,’ Natasha says, looking about ready to rip her dress off and just rush off after the danger in her knickers. ‘There are no other words.’

There are plenty of words, but none of them seem strong enough.

Bucky nods, gives both Steve and Natasha a look, and then takes off after Clint, catching him up just past the doors. Sam and Natasha stand either side of Sitwell and look at him, while Steve does his best to look threatening. He’s five-two, so it doesn’t get very far.

‘It’s very unfair,’ Natasha says, and smoothes the front of her ruffles down. ‘I wanted to kick him in the chest.’

‘You punched him in the face,’ Sam tells her.

‘I know, but I’ve been practicing my kicks with Clint and he’s very frightened of them.’

Sam’s ears go pink. ‘Well, your legs are – Either way, you got to punch him in the face, and that’s just as good.’

‘Can I kick him now, I can get a good kick to his ribs with him down there. I hate wearing dresses, and I won’t wear one when we get married. I might not wear anything at all, the way this dress has me feeling.’

‘Can we focus?’ Steve asks, because Sam is doing a very good impression of a fish, trying to come up with a retort that’s suitable for public consumption, and moves to squat by Sitwell’s shoulder. ‘Jasper, we’ve worked the majority of it out, you know we have. But there’s a few things I don’t know.’

‘I won’t tell you,’ Sitwell says, ‘you’ll have to kill me.’

Sam drags the sword point down the man’s cheek towards his throat. ‘I can easily arrange that.’

Sitwell hisses, but doesn’t flinch. ‘You don’t scare me, Wilson. You’re not a threat.’

At this, Natasha _does_ kick him, and his cry of pain can be heard even over the din.

‘Just tell us, Sitwell,’ Steve says, ‘and you’ll be lucky to be hanged in the morning. It doesn’t matter either way, we know it’s Pierce and the Baron. All we want to know is who that man was.’

Sitwell laughs. ‘You don’t know anything at all. You don’t even know who that is?’

‘If he was a guard during the war, there’s not a lot we can do about it,’ Steve shrugs. ‘We were children then, too young to be a part of it, and blaming Clint, trying to kill a Duchess, that doesn’t solve the problem. He’s not the enemy.’

‘No, but he is a problem that will be dealt with.’

‘So what, Pierce can become Regent? Kill the Barton bloodline and put a whole other family on the throne? Like who, the Zemos? Don’t be ridiculous, that would never fly in the Council.’

Sitwell’s silence is all the answer they need for the last pieces to fall into place.

Natasha stares in horror at Steve, who stares back at her. Sam continues to dig his sword point into vulnerable places on Sitwell’s neck, and stares intently at the jumping pulse next to it.

‘Jasper Sitwell,’ Sam says eventually, and the ballroom is achingly silent now everyone has fled. ‘You are under arrest for treason and conspiracy to commit regicide.’

Passing his sword to Natasha, he grabs the man by the collar and hauls him to his feet.

‘I’ll put some trousers on,’ Natasha says, ‘and go after them.’

‘No,’ Sam says, shaking his head. ‘No, stay in the palace. You saw his sword, there are people injured. Maybe even dead. Help them. Bucky will keep Clint safe, and you won’t be able to catch up to Laura before them.’

Steve looks up to where the Regent had been sitting. ‘Where’s Nick?’

‘Find him,’ Sam says, and starts dragging Sitwell to the doors. ‘And for God’s sake, don’t get yourself killed in the process. I’ll join you as soon as I’ve locked this prick up.’

He kicks at Sitwell’s calves until the man starts to walk, and Natasha and Steve rush to other doors to do their part.

* * *

 

Laura runs as fast as she can through the corridors, through the screaming horde of people, and down the first flight of stairs she comes to, barrelling through the doors at the end, and apologises profusely to the startled cooks on the other side. Her dress is really too big to fit through the small space of the kitchen at the speed she’s going, and she knocks all sorts of trays and pans off the sides, still hollering apologies as she goes. Then she’s out of the kitchen and back into the servants’ corridors and this corset is really too tight to run like this!

Not a minute after she’s gone through the door, a man with a black suit and white decorations with a mask over his face comes rushing in, and the cooks send him back the way he came.

Laura is lost, but she keeps running until she finds herself outside. A saddled horse is stood there, grazing at the hay on offer, and she looks at it as it jerks its head up at her slamming the door.

‘Hello,’ she pants, and hikes her skirts to approach as gently as possible, hand outstretched. ‘I need your help.’

The horse looks at her. The shouting gets louder.

‘Please,’ she says.

The horse turns to offer her a better position to get into the saddle. As soon as her feet are in the stirrups, she’s kicking her heels and they’re going, galloping through the gates and out of the palace grounds as fast as they can go. She’ll sort out of the tangled mess of dress and uncomfortable pulling of fabric as soon as she’s got some distance, but she needs to get away from here.

* * *

 

Clint is not far behind her, taking the conventional route to the stables to get his horse, although he does slide down the banister and scare one of the butlers into falling down the stairs. He yells apologies over his shoulder and tells him to take a month off before barging through the door and rushing into the stable for his horse. Bucky is hot on his heels, and runs down the same stairs three at a time, staggering over his feet on landing, but catches the doors and yells to the guards to secure the palace, not just stand there gawking.

‘Clint!’ he hollers, as the Prince crashes into the stables and grabs his saddle.

‘I’m going after them, Buck!’

As he saddles the horse, Bucky looks around. Two of the horses are missing; one of the chestnuts and the splash white. Coulson had said that he would let one of the horses out, saddled and ready for if it was needed, which is what Bucky assumes Laura has used to escape, assuming she’s out of the palace. The broken gate on the splash white’s stall suggests that the assassin’s taken it, and there’s no sign a saddle has been taken.

Bucky doesn’t bother saddling his own horse, just opens its stall and leads it out behind Clint’s palomino, swinging up as soon as he’s got room. The horse is used to him riding bareback, because Bucky has been doing dumb shit on horseback since he was old enough to ride, and doesn’t take issue with being kicked into a gallop alongside Clint.

‘Where is she going?’ he calls over the wind rushing past them.

There are still fireworks going overhead, whizzing and popping and casting brilliant shadows across the paths.

‘I don’t know,’ Clint says, but he thinks he does, and directs them towards town. ‘She won’t go home, the Baron will look for her there. And there isn’t – there’s a place in town, she has friends. She’ll go to them, if she goes to anyone.’

‘Then we need to get there before he does. If he knew she was going to be at the ball, he’ll know she’ll head there.’

‘No,’ Clint says, ‘no, I can – we can find her later. We’ve got to slow him down. She’s a tough girl, she’ll be safer if we leave her alone.’

But it kills him to say it, even though he knows it’s true. If there’s anything he’s learnt talking to her tonight, it’s that the townsfolk would not see her hurt. If Mister Howlett, whoever he is, would punch a man for looking down her dress, someone trying to kill her would have a very hard time indeed. He just hopes she can get into town and get to the twins before the masked man catches up to her.

‘Who even is he?’ he snaps, and Bucky shakes his head.

‘I don’t know, but we’ll find out. Just keep riding!’

It doesn’t take them long at all to catch up to the assassin, riding his horse hard in the direction of town.

‘Hey!’ Clint roars, and kicks his horse to run harder. The beast is exhausted, but knows that Clint needs this, needs to move, and does its best. ‘Fucker!’

‘Eloquent,’ Bucky snorts, but follows suit in chasing him down.

Not without some recklessness, Clint unhooks his feet from his stirrups and leaps off his horse onto the assassin’s back, sending them and the horse tumbling into the dirt. They’ve come up fighting by the time Bucky’s reined his horse in, a momentary hesitation of whether he should leave Clint to it and chase Laura down now the assassin is delayed, but he’s going to be needed here. Clint is a fantastic brawler, can win most if not all spars in the palace, where they employ only the best. Hell, he’s beaten Bucky in a fight before, and nobody can beat Bucky’s left hook. But this.

This is something else entirely. He’s heard about Frank Castle once grinding a man’s face into glass out of anger, but the drive behind the assassin’s blows. Clint’s nose is already broken, and his leg is not far behind, the crack ringing in the trees.

So Bucky leaps onto the assassin and does his best to put him down, but the man throws him off. Bucky does take his mask with him, though, leaves his face open to the air.

‘You!’ Clint spits, and blood comes with it. ‘You were the fucker in the woods that day.’

Bucky looks at him sharply. ‘The one that threatened you?’

‘Told me to back the off Laura. You would have killed her then, wouldn’t you? If I hadn’t been there?’

The man wipes blood from his split lip. ‘You aren’t entirely stupid, it seems.’

They take a second to get their breath back. Clint is staggering on his broken leg, but he’s still standing. Bucky gets beside him, draws his sword.

‘You aren’t going to kill her,’ he says, and Clint lays a hand on Bucky’s arm.

‘Be my second,’ he says.

‘That’s not what a second is for!’ Bucky cries. ‘Years! Years I’ve spent on duel etiquette with you, and this is what you take from it! Defend your honour when you’re dead! Fantastic!’

The assassin seems amused.

‘My name is Rumlow, by the way,’ he says, ‘if you’d care to challenge me properly.’

Clint waves his bloody, bare hands. ‘No gloves,’ he says, ‘but consider that shot to the face my glove at your feet.’

‘Don’t get yourself killed,’ Bucky says, and Clint gives him an acerbic look.

Then he leaps at Rumlow with a battle cry that has the birds flying from the trees.

* * *

 

Nick is in Clint’s garden when Steve finds him. Everyone knows of the garden, of course, but out of respect, everybody has left it alone and never enters, but Steve supposes things are different now. He stands in the grassy patch with something small in his hand.

‘I remember this,’ he says when Steve raises a hand to knock at the door. ‘I had it commissioned for her mother’s wedding, as a present to her.’

‘You brought her to the palace hoping to marry her to Clint, didn’t you?’ Steve asks, ‘because she’s the Duchess you brought Natasha in to replace.’

Nick nods. ‘Things never go quite as you plan them. People have a habit of doing stupid shit when you aren’t looking.’

‘Like plot coups?’

Nick snorts. ‘Amongst other things.’

* * *

 

Laura makes it as far as town before the horse tires, which is fine, she’d only wanted to come as far as town anyway, but she yanks too hard on the reins to get him to stop, and he rears, throwing her off. She tumbles backwards and hits the cobblestones hard, crying out and then just crying, because it hurts, and she’s terrified, and it seems a perfectly reasonable thing for a woman to do in these circumstances.

The horse bolts, and it’ll draw attention from whoever’s left in town with it prancing about, but she can’t bring herself to get up and chase after it when lying on the cobbles in a ruined ballgown paid for by the palace was so much more appealing.

‘Whoa, whoa, gently, gentle, there you go.’

The voice is gentle, masculine, and the horse brays before settling with stomps of its feet. Laura looks up to see a man in a dark suit holding the reins and leading the horse back to her.

‘Ma’am,’ he says, with the accent of a man educated in one of those fancy universities far from town, ‘are you alright? The horse threw you, I believe.’

She stares at him, and he stares at her, and abruptly, he smiles.

‘I believe you must be Laura, Wanda spoke fondly of you enough to recognise the gold in your eyes, though they are rather red. I hope you haven’t been crying for long.’

Laura continues to lie there and continues to stare at him, standing there with one hand on the reins and the other petting the horse’s nose, and smiling at her like an old friend.

‘I,’ she starts, and then shakes her head. ‘I think my arm’s broken.’

He jumps a little, and grips the reins tight before offering her his hand. ‘Then you’d best come with me, ma’am. I am not a physician, but I can have one brought to you.’

Then what he’d said sinks in, and she staggers to her feet, aching in places she didn’t know existed, her heart still pounding a fearful jig against her ribs. She’d heard stories of people dancing until they died, and she wonders if that might be what’s happening to her.

‘Wanda,’ she says, ‘you know her?’

He seems confused, and then smiles again. ‘Of course, how rude of me, we haven’t been introduced yet. My name is Victor, ma’am, I have the privilege of having Wanda’s hand. Her eligibility to attend balls, she calls it. Now come, you are frightened and filthy, and I think you’d be best served getting out of sight.’

Victor watches the street behind her, and Laura doesn’t dare look over her shoulder as he leads her through a winding path to a little house on the edge of town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- a new friend! a new couple villains! Sam taking over for Nat bc there are no rooftops but there are big dresses  
> \- you can find rough ideas of what laura's dresses look like in the 'when i am king' tag on my tumblr @vinnie2757  
> \- this chapter was so much fun to write you guys, i hope you enjoyed it!!!!


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